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

by Trey Holt

  In the crowded courtroom, the lawyer his wealthy parents who now lived in Nashville provided him, Jack Noonan, watching as he testified, Fred Burkitt told the dark tale that he said had haunted him since that Sunday evening turned Monday morning. His testimony, which Fred Creason described as“flawless but believable,”told of him bringing himself downstairs in the Burgess boarding house late the evening of December 12th. His stump was hurting, he said, something he had heard called pain of a“phantom limb,”and he was going to ask Bette Burgess for some aspirin. In the room that connected to the lobby of the boarding house, he could hear voices and thought that it was simply Bette and Sherman still awake talking. Upon pushing the cracked door open, he found Bette seated at the table, watching as Sherman performed the last touches of slitting Rosa Mary Dean’s throat for, what he guessed, was the third or fourth time. The moment his eyes met Bette and Sherman’s, he stated, he knew he was next, which Sherman told him in no uncertain terms. As he described Sherman Burgess’s threat and referred to himself as a“wounded veteran of the war,”he began to cry and state that Ronnie Langford had been a hero, not him. If he’d been a hero, he explained, he wouldn’t have gone along with such a thing as he agreed to that night. With little more prodding, he explained, he had used his one good arm to help them wrap the body of this woman, still warm, in a sheet and lay her under the window out which they would take her a few hours later. He had also helped them clean up the mess and dispose of the towels and the weapon. Bobby Bishop’s involvement, he explained, would come when it came time to dispose of the body.

  Unable to help with carrying the body to the extent needed, Sherman again threatened him to find someone else to help. Going up to the rooms upstairs, he explained, he quickly decided that Robert Smith and Louis Woodson would be of little help, one crazy and one drunk. The two able-bodied people there at the time were Miss Ivey and Bobby Bishop, just having come in from a whiskey run from Alabama. When he returned downstairs with these two, Sherman immediately berated him for bringing Mary Ivey and sent her back upstairs to bed with a similar threat as to the one he’d made to Fred Burkitt. As for Bobby Bishop, he had helped Sherman and Fred Burkitt, what little help he was, carry the body to the high school, where they had planned to place her in the incinerator. Upon arriving, though, the janitor and some kids across the parking lot had appeared and Bobby Bishop had abandoned his efforts and run. Sherman Burgess had struggled for a few moments, again threatening Fred Burkitt if he didn’t help him, and then given up when he seemed to realize he was again getting the woman’s blood, though now mostly dry, on himself. Finally, Fred and Sherman left the body and made their way back to the Burgess house, some hundred and fifty yards away. According to his story, the next thing he had heard about was later in the day when he was at the pool hall downtown, something he could successfully do with his arm contraption, when word got there that there had been a murder overnight in Franklin and the body had been found at the high school.

  On cross-examination, the public defender, Jefferson Daly, questioned him dutifully about the morphine habit he had, that had been developed and maintained since the Second World War. He was asked if this habit ever affected his ability to perceive and interpret reality correctly, which he answered affirmatively. The public defender so lambasted him that in the end it seemed as though he might ask about the destruction of the cemetery, but did not. According to Lucky, who was at the trial at least a good portion of the time, Fred’s parents sat on the back row of the courthouse, his mother often weeping concerning what her son had become. Even before the trial, Lucky’s theory had long been that they had moved to Nashville after Fred had returned, fairly derelict, from the war, so they did not have to cast their eyes on him on a near daily basis. Right or wrong, it is easier to avoid family members sometimes, he explained to me, than face what they have become.

  Bobby Bishop did not fair so well. The day of his testimony, the only day of the trial Sharon attended, he was forced to admit what he had been doing for a living for the last few years, even before he dropped out of Franklin High School and became a full-time whiskey runner. He was also drawn to testify that his mother had made him leave his own home in the last year, though I was unsure this was the truth. Nevertheless, in the end, he reported utterly the same story of the night that Fred Burkitt had, which Mary Ivey also corroborated when she testified.

  According to Fred Creason in one of his kinder moments, my father’s testimony and ultimate police work, although possibly“acrimonious,”were in their own right fairly accurate. It was almost as if he had not previously criticized him, but now held the opinion that the case had been fairly airtight from the beginning and Lucky had simply carried through with the things laid before him.

  The jury of twelve white men, of course, did convict Bette and Sherman Burgess of first degree murder. According to hearsay around town, the last holdout was Sammy Samuels, still convinced that Arliss and Jackson Mosby had something to do with it. But, in the end, faced with the evidence and eleven other jurors, he, too, voted for guilty and the death penalty for both. Neither of them, though, would come to their end in the electric chair, but of cancer and a heart attack, respectively, as they awaited their state-designated fate. As for the boarding house they ran and lived in, the tenants, Robert Woodson, Louis Smith, Mary Ivey, Fred Burkitt and Bobby Bishop, were scattered to the four winds. Robert and Louis disappeared, perhaps together, and only resurfaced occasionally to paint a house or do handy work for somebody around town. Mary Ivey rode her horse to a hotel downtown that went out of business in the early sixties when the interstates began to initiate their change to the American landscape forever, and disappeared then. I will never see a woman wearing riding pants that I don’t think of her, and subsequently, Rosa Mary Dean, who was buried in Mt. Hope Cemetery on the outskirts of town at a service that included only Lucky, myself, George Preston and George Dillon, the Methodist preacher good enough to donate his time to this woman nobody knew. There are still days that it feels to me that grave is somehow strangely calling me. Seeing how it is the place where many of my family members are now buried, including my own mother and father, I go by and stare at it for only a few moments, and as I stand there I always wonder if anyone has been there since the last time I was. I also wonder at the nature of life and its strangeness, Bette and Sherman Burgess laid in their plots under a big elm tree, little more than a hundred yards away.

  As for Fred Burkitt and Bobby Bishop, they would move back in with their respective parents, Fred with his wealthy parents in Nashville who now seemed to realize he was somehow better off taking morphine in their house than in some flophouse in Franklin, and Bobby Bishop, back in with his mother, who seemed to realize she had a need for him, especially after Sharon left. As for the Burgess house itself, it was sold at auction by Sammy Samuels early in the spring of 1954, bringing about enough for its bull-dozing. Another row house was built in its place but then itself sold and eventually torn down. The sight of the crime now lies under the concrete and asphalt that constitute the road that runs between apartment buildings and the back of a grocery store that Van’s mother and father opened when Scoot left his job with the city.

  As for Sharon and me, we would leave the day after my graduation and ten days before hers, to travel to Mississippi so that we might be wed at a local justice of the peace. Sharon’s mother accompanied us, because she was yet to turn eighteen, as I had a month before. As Sharon had dreamed, we bought a used house trailer and put it, in all places, in the yard behind my mother and father’s house, blocking the view that had drawn them to the property in the first place. Our escape had lasted a good weekend at cheap motel on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga until we had returned and figured we barely made enough to pay for the trailer, much less a lot to put it on. Tully would marry the same year and father a child with his longtime sweetheart, Christine.

  In 1956, Van married Georgeanne James, a school teacher four years his senior who had moved to town to teach
at the high school. His charm always remaining in tact, he would become a salesman of farm equipment and supplies and move to several acres in the country where he lived until cancer claimed him just after his fiftieth birthday. Over the years, we always remained in touch, except for a brief few years after Sharon told me he had once again made a pass at her when we were in our late twenties, propositioning her to visit a nearby motel after they had lunch together one day. Of course, he denied it, and eventually, I once again forgave him. In the end, I concluded as I had before, that it was just Van. No more, no less.

  In 1958, I received my draft order to move to Fort Sill, Oklahoma and became a soldier for two years. Thankfully, the conflict in Korea had ended and the war in Viet Nam had not yet come to a full boil. As for the trailer, we pulled it the distance between Franklin and Fort Sill in the 1939 junk heap we’d bought after Sharon’s car had pretty much played out. We had no more than made it through the Arkansas hills and across the flat dusty land of Oklahoma, that my mother called to inform me that Tully had been killed in a car wreck. His wife and daughter, riding with him at the time, were unscathed but he was propelled through a window after being struck hard in the side by a truck after running a red light. According to my mother, who’d gotten her information from Van’s mother, he was going to visit his mother, who’d called from a truckstop on her way through the outskirts of Nashville.

  Three years after Lucky was told to quit smoking by Dr. Guppy, he was hospitalized for the first time after passing out in the driveway on a hot day, near the same spot that Jean had fallen after I’d hit her in the head with the shovel in the winter of 1945. The hospitalizations, at first, would come infrequently, with months of what seemed like normalcy between them. By 1960, though, it seemed as though he was spending as much time in Vanderbilt as he was out. Each time, the doctor, Guppy at first, and then his lung doctor, Dr. Clemons, would lecture him just before he was again birthed into the world a free man. And each time he would nod his head then be smoking like a freight train again in a few days, if not the day he was released.

  It was in 1959 that Sharon and I came home from Oklahoma to surprise Lucky for his birthday. Mama, age beginning to take at least some of her spryness by now, rose more slowly from the chair when we knocked at the door.

  “Dillard’s gone to the river,”she told me. As she hugged and kissed me then Sharon, she explained he had wanted to go fishing for his birthday.

  At the river, on that sunny fall afternoon, Sharon and I found the Ford and pulled in as quiet as we could behind it, then crossed through the brush and the bushes on our way down the hill to the bank. Stepping on a twig, Sharon alerted him to our presence and called him by name.“Daddy Lucky,”she called him. Without further provocation he threw two packs of Lucky Strikes and a book of matches into the water, neither looking back to see who it was or offering any explanation of what he had done. When we reached him, he acted as if what he had done had been invisible. In the end, it seems, he had made the same decision concerning himself and his situation as he had his brother’s. Wrong or right, the freedom to make your own decisions seems to hold as much importance as anything else in this life. Without the power to choose, the object of the choice is worth very little.

  In the last years of his life, Jean having moved to the next county with her husband and two babies, he grew close not only to Sharon, who could say things to him and speak to him in ways that none of the rest of us could, but he somehow came to think highly of Bobby Bishop, her brother. Many times they traded stories about his running whiskey up from Alabama and Lucky’s knowing it and subsequently monitoring who could bring whiskey in and who couldn’t. Occasionally—or to be honest—almost as often as not, they’d have these conversations over a bottle of the near pure grain that Bobby still had access to and Lucky asked no questions about, because he would have had to tell the new police chief, Johnny Forrest.

  In the end, or at least in the last half dozen or so hospital visits of his life, when his breath would become as escapist as the smoke that once rose from his mouth in the living room and stained the ceiling, Bobby, initially against my better judgment, would bring him cigarettes and sneak them to him when the nurse was out of the room. In the last few weeks, his introduction to a respirator and his smoking a phantom cigarette while he smiled, convinced me that Bobby’s method was, I believe, the right thing to do.

  What was done, was done. The days now were a gift, or a curse, I wasn’t certain. Nevertheless, I knew they were the last ones he was to have. And should be lived fully, whatever that word might mean. I’m convinced it means something different with each breath. More convinced of that each day I live.

  In the middle of June in 1960, he was laid out in Celestial Gardens of the Franklin Chapel, the same room where Rosa Mary Dean had been…and Percy after they had recovered his body from the river. George Preston and Michael, who had returned by then, made Lucky look as though he had not suffered a many year battle with the devil we all fight in some manner for his air and his life, and both stood proudly and stately at the door and greeted most of the town as they filed in to pay their respects. My mother, the constant companion and brave soul she was, stood just past them, and welcomed each one who came to pay respect to her late husband, smiling and continually expressing her appreciation of their appreciation of him. Forgetting, as they did, what was left to forget. As I began to hope that, in the end, such things are indeed forgotten. Prayed, for Lucky, for myself, that it is so.

  A dozen years later, on a July afternoon, my mother would call and tell me that her intent was to marry a man she’d been seeing who lived on the next street. For the years since Lucky had left this world, she had remained single, living on his life insurance and pension, keeping herself busy working at Henry’s Grocery by the Gilco five half-days a week. Initially, I gave her steady grievous hell about her decision to marry another man besides my father. But eventually accepted it, then reassessed my attitude and thinking after my own life made its way to hell in a handbasket. I came to believe that we should embrace joy when it in fact presents itself. As Sharon was, I believed, forty at seventeen, she would in turn become seventeen at forty. Two years later, I found myself alone, raising the only child we’d had, a son named Dillard Percy Hall. I never once called him lucky.

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  THE END

  Unmarked grave of Rosa Mary Dean