“Holy Christ,” Clarissa said. She reached for the dossier. “Give me some pages.”
Sitting at a burger joint called Sonic, in a 1970 Chevy El Camino SS, on the shortest night of the year, which was also, as luck would have it, the hottest (how could it not be, given the day’s bludgeoning heat?), Clarissa and Adams read through the dossier, sometimes sharing information, sometimes not, each uncovering the secrets of Clarissa’s house and the tragedy of the family who had first called it home.
“How do we know if all of this stuff is true?” Adams asked, rubbing his eyes. “Or what’s true and what’s been spun for money, politics, people covering up their own shit?”
“We don’t,” Clarissa said. “It’s like religion—you either believe or you don’t.”
And Clarissa, for all of her struggles with writer’s block, remained a devout and skilled believer. Each time the historical trail grew murky, her old knack for narrative kicked in. Before they had downed the last French fry or touched the second bottle of wine, Clarissa was certain she knew exactly what had happened to the Villada-Archers.
In the fall of 1825, a group of four brothers, last name Butler, set out from Flatbush, New York, with six flintlock rifles, ten horses, the clothes on their backs, two hundred dollars (most of which was willed to them by their father, who died from injuries sustained when he was trampled by a runaway stagecoach), a proclivity toward less talk and more violence, a shared determination to become rich men, and not much else. But at the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, those assets—along with a dose of luck and/or fate—were all that were needed to reinvent a life and destroy a host of others.
Having tested the abolitionist winds in New York and sensing that slavery would not be long-lived in that state, the Butler boys headed out. Florida had not been their firm intention. But as they traveled farther south (below Virginia, the whole world seemed to be on the move), everything they heard about the new territory and its possibilities (acres upon acres of cheap, fertile land, an abundant, no-end-in-sight free labor source, and no real lawmen of note) inspired them to push on.
By the time they crossed into Florida, all but one of the Butlers were bona fide killers. The middle boy, Bobby, had shot a man in the back because the man had beaten him, fair and square, in a poker game in a Beaufort saloon and Bobby didn’t take well to losing. The man stumbled out of the saloon and fell facedown in the road that was mostly mud thanks to a recent downpour. Bobby turned him over and using nothing but his fingers dug out his left eyeball (gray-eyed son of a bitch), popped it in his mouth while the orb was still warm, chewed with the vigor and good manners of a starving dog, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and said, “A tad chewy, but still, that there is some gooooood eating!”
His intent, of course, wasn’t to satiate his need for protein or gore, but to inspire any bystanders who might have been considering taking him on to reconsider the wisdom of such a move.
Lawrence Butler, the baby and the only nonmurderer among them, broke six hearts—him with his long blond hair and sweet-talking ways—and lost two teeth along the journey.
Hazelton Butler, one year older than Lawrence, for the most part kept a lid on his violent nature because he wanted to store his rage—much of it stemming from a generalized disgust with human nature—until they got to where they were going, so it could be used to maximum benefit. He did, however, slit the throat of a black field hand in Virginia because he wanted to know what kind of force it took to cut through black skin. This particular crime could have landed him in serious trouble, because slaves—while supplying free labor—were not cheap, and slaveholders did not take kindly to losing their property. So the boys’ time in Virginia was brief.
Maurice Butler, the oldest, fearing that his dreamtime fantasies involving trysts with young boys meant he was a homosexual, raped three women—one in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania (she was not quite a woman, being only fourteen), one in a barn in Maryland (her skin was so dark, he thought she might be mulatto; he carved an M into her cheek with his hunting knife so she would not forget him), and one in a pasture in south Georgia (she was well past her prime, maybe in her sixties, which was old in the 1820s, and, unable to put up much of a fight, she just whimpered and prayed, knobby word after knobby word uttered without effect, worry beads trapped in a bone-dry clutch, “no dear God no dear God no dear no God no”).
Lawrence wasn’t sure about all this violence, but because—given his birth order—he had no standing of any merit, he was impotent to do much about it. He did speak up about the rapes, however. The night of the Georgia assault, under the brilliant starlight afforded by a new moon, when they were camped in a field north of Thomasville, Lawrence protested gently. “I just don’t understand why you have to rape them,” he said, staring into his battered tin cup, which stank with the after-rise of stale whiskey.
“There’s no rape going on, baby brother,” Maurice said, a snake smile slipping across his face. “I could tell they wanted it. Every single one of them. That little pink bud between their legs twitched like crazy, a flesh-and-blood jumping bean. Stupid whores.”
Lawrence shook his head; the kernel of morality that rolled loose and wild in the pit of his gut could not abide his brother’s actions. “Bullshit,” he said.
Maurice spit in the dirt and muttered, slow and soft and with the dead intent of a hangman who enjoys the wooden muffle of the trapdoor opening, “There is no such thing as rape. Plain and simple. We rule this earth, little brother. Everything out there”—he nodded his head to the vast blackness—“is ours for the taking. You got that?”
As they crossed into Florida, the boys had in their possession thirteen rifles, seven horses, and a modest herd of cattle that they had amassed by rustling one here, another there (in Cairo, Georgia, they stole six cows from Mrs. Whitaker Peacock, a woman who was recently widowed and had no idea how many cows she owned until her stock had dwindled to six).
When the four men gained the steps to Olga Villada’s home and knocked on the door, she, in all likelihood, offered the men refreshments. And surely the conversation turned to land, and perhaps Olga Villada and Amaziah Archer were interested—now that Florida had been discovered and Amaziah and Heart were in ever greater danger of losing their freedom—in selling some, if not all, of her vast holdings. Finding a safe way out of Florida and to Spain, the most likely scenario to ensure the continued safety and prosperity of this family, would not be an easy, safe, or cheap proposition.
The archives held no clues as to the details of how the crime unfolded. Did Maurice rape Olga Villada? Did he harm the boy? Given the sadism the Butler boys had already exhibited, what heinous denigrations did they inflict upon Amaziah Archer? As one document suggested, did they force Amaziah Archer to play the fiddle while one or two of them harmed his common-law wife and son? Or was that simply a grotesque rumor spun in the aftermath of a terror so great that adding lies to the crime diminished its cruel reality?
Clarissa did not know. A goodly portion of her refused to know. Whatever prevented her from feeling like a whole woman with a future wild with possibilities also prevented her from fully imagining the god-awful last moments of Olga Villada, Amaziah Archer, and Heart Archer. When it came to understanding their deaths, at least while she sat in the neon glow of Sonic, Clarissa dared only to tangle herself in the facts as presented in the dog-eared, French fry–fingerprinted pages of the dossier.
According to documents attached to the coroner’s report, on June 15, 1826, a little slave boy—name omitted, but age given as ten years old—discovered the family as he walked through the swampy forest on his way to the general store, a task assigned him by his mistress, a Mrs. Lucretius H. Ball. The boy was reported to have made this statement: “I was walking by Black Hole Slough on the north side of Jake’s Hell when I heard something way high. I looked up and studied on that giant oak on the dead people’s land. And there theys were, the three of them, just a-swinging, blowed by the wind.”
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br /> The victims had been severely beaten. Amaziah Archer had been bullwhipped. All the bodies, to varying degrees, had been burned. “Evidence of torture is abundant,” wrote the medical examiner in a right-leaning, elegant cursive script.
Cornelius Slidell, a reporter for the Florida Intelligencer, wrote in the June 30, 1826, edition:
Eyewitnesses report the beaten, burned corpses were found hanging from three separate nooses, yet their bodies were intertwined and from a distance appeared to be part of the tree. A thirty-four-year-old man who declined to be identified said, “They’s was all of one piece, woven tight into each other—no sunlight a’tall shining through, just flesh-to-flesh, twisting, swaying like a muscle-bound vine from that big old oak out back the house. Looks like that family, they died clinging to each other, suffering themselves into one person. The mama and daddy managed to nestle the baby between them. I think they cradled that child straight to God.
The only other entry about the house or Olga Villada’s real estate holdings was a listing in the September 14, 1826, Intelligencer in the “Land Acquisitions” section:
Butler and Butler, Incorporated, a family interest in Aucilla County, have acquired from the state tax agency, for a total sum of $3.95, one hundred acres, more or less, of land in said county. Included in the parcel is the former homestead of the recently deceased Olga Villada, who is thought to have been a Spanish-born citizen.
When Clarissa and Adams finished the final page, they sat for a good two minutes in silence. Adams reached for the Jack Daniel’s. “I’m fucking glad I bought this,” he said.
Clarissa held the dossier, her hands shaking, overwhelmed by the reminder of the human capacity for violence. She did not want the story to be true. She did not want the couple and their child to have suffered in any way. She did not want the image of their charred, beaten bodies swinging as one from a rope slung over a branch of the sentinel oak to be burned into her memory bank as if she herself had been a witness. She did not want—in the long, gravitational pull of history—to be stained with culpability. But she was. America was. She remembered the truck that belonged to the boys who had ice-picked her tires: the FORGET HELL bumper sticker and the vinyl wrap image of the Stars and Bars. “Ignorant, fucking little jerks,” she said.
“What are you talking about, Ms. Burden?” Adams readjusted the rose in her hair.
“Nothing… I’ve just had quite the day. One-eyed men, quick mud cemeteries, pet rattlesnakes, and punks with ice picks.”
“And you bought Yellow Bird.”
Clarissa smiled. “Yes, indeed I did. Did you notice that the B and B has one of those old signs about management reserving the right to refuse service?”
“I did not see that.”
“Well, they sure as hell have. It’s hanging in the dining room. The old lady dismissed it as her nephew’s poor attempt at interior decorating. How would she feel if the tables had been turned? If it had been her white relatives who were refused a seat at the table?”
“You know what I’m going to do?” Adams sipped his JD. She could tell by the set of his jaw that he was letting the liquor linger on his tongue.
“What?”
“When I get back there tonight, I’m going to steal that fucking sign. And the next time I see you? We’re going to burn it.”
“You serious?”
“One hundred percent.”
Clarissa believed him. “You rock, Leo Adams.”
He tapped the dossier. “This all sucks, what happened to them. What the hell is wrong with people?”
“You know, that old woman at the B and B said she was married to a Butler.”
Adams swirled his JD. “Christ. She sure did.”
“And that place looks like a cheap knockoff of my house.” She recalled the fading, sepia-toned photo on the wall of the four men—one missing an arm, another an eye—and her unease.
“Those guys in the photo, Adams, I think they were the Butler boys. Jesus. Years later, they went on to become respected businessmen. They were murderers! Terrorists!”
Adams picked up the dossier. “Clarissa, this is it. This is what you ought to be writing.”
She looked at him; his eyes appeared lit with a certainty that Clarissa could not bear. How could she explain that he had no idea what a dark and dangerous place her internal landscape really was? She wanted to agree with him. He would like that. It would make for nice chitchat. But she couldn’t. She could not lie about her current capacity—which was zero—to immerse herself in horrors committed by monstrous men. What amounted to a hypersensitivity to torture and cruelty—born from being raised by a mother who stubbed out cigarettes on her arms and thighs while telling her that little boys hated little girls with buckteeth so much that they wanted to pee on them, that she should run if she was alone and a boy approached, because surely she was about to be pissed on (the cruelty of both word and deed)—prevented Clarissa from agreeing with Adams or admitting to herself that perhaps the story of Olga and Amaziah Archer was what the blank, mocking virtual pages of her word processor were waiting for. In her mind, the letters lined up: RISK. And then she revised the one-word directive, turning it into a two-word warning: TOO RISKY.
“Are you done?” she asked, erasing the words from her mental blackboard.
“Full up,” he said.
She needed a change of both scenery and subject. “Well, the coast isn’t too far now.”
Adams leaned toward her, maybe a half inch. She could have sworn that the possibility of a kiss existed, stirred by shared sadness, twin yearnings. But then he turned away, his face betraying not a single drop of want, jammed the key in the ignition, and started the engine. As they pulled out of Sonic and headed south, he said, “Too bad Iggy isn’t here. I would have liked to see him.”
Clarissa, unsure if he was being cruel, sarcastic, or naively honest, balled up the waxed-paper wrappers and shoved them in the greasy Sonic bag, her silver bracelets chiming softly. They should have left the trash behind, but he’d taken off too suddenly. “I’m sure he feels likewise,” she said, careful to avoid any note of remorse, regret, reality.
The wind whipped and the temperature dropped as they approached the coast. Lightning illuminated storm clouds boiling up along the wide seam of the horizon. The change in the weather helped ameliorate the somber mood that had descended thanks to the hard blade of the dossier.
“Is there a beach around here?” Adams asked, slowing down as they entered the blinking-light hamlet of Ochlockonee Bay.
“Yep. Take a left at the light, just past the BP. Mashes Sands. I don’t think they patrol down there.”
“Are you going to get us arrested, baby?”
“That would make for good literary cocktail party gossip.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“Exactly.”
Something darted across the road. Adams slammed the brakes. “What the hell was that?”
“Bobcat! How great!”
“Really? Maybe I should have bought some pepper spray at Walmart.”
“Nah. That stuff only pisses them off.”
“That’s my girl. Anything else out here I ought to know about?”
“Don’t feed the bears.”
Adams laughed, and Clarissa felt the tension that had gripped her at Sonic ease. She was happy to slip into the safety zone of meaningless banter, happy to behave as though she did not live with a family of tragic ghosts and a holier-than-thou husband. She hoped Adams would not mention him again.
They wound their way down a deserted two-lane blacktop, a canopy of stars shining close and bright. Porch and dock lights flickered in the distance, giving shadowy form to fishing cabins and river houses. Piney woods thinned into wire-grass savannas and saltwater flats. Eventually, in graceful measure, all semblance of terra firma gave way to the gently arched hip of the Gulf of Mexico. When they could go no farther because they had reached land’s end, Adams and Clarissa got out of the El Camino, slipped off their shoes, rolled up
the hems of their jeans nearly to their knees, and—not touching—walked toward the sea.
“I like the sound of those bracelets,” Adams said, marching, Clarissa thought, with undo but charming purpose.
“Me too.” The wind whipped over them. Lightning, far out to sea, pulsed. The low-tide surf song unfurled to the cadence of the planets. The stars sparkled from the high dome of the sky all the way down to the warm and restless water.
Clarissa felt Adams’s presence more acutely than ever. As the surf washed over their toes, feet, ankles, she said, “Look at all those stars.”
“I’ve never seen a sky like this. Except in dreams. Never in person. No wonder the ancients decided it was crowded with gods.”
“Sure beats TV.”
“Look,” Adams said, “those two stars—real close together—the ones whose light holds steady?”
Clarissa followed the invisible line—hand to sky.
“They aren’t stars. It’s Mars and Saturn. They were right near on top of each other a few nights ago. Now they’re drifting apart again, like a planetary tango.”
As Clarissa searched for the dancing planets, the rose Adams had placed in her hair fell silently into the water and ebbed away. Neither of them noticed.
Adams continued his sky search, pointing out Jupiter’s waning light and “over there, way down low in the west? That’s Mercury.” When Clarissa wasn’t actively engaged in his planetary tour, she was covertly studying Adams. He was so engrossed in the sky, she was sure he didn’t notice. As he chattered, his Adam’s apple wobbled and she thought it looked knobby, like an oak burl. It struck her as hilarious that someone named Adams would actually have an Adam’s apple. Or maybe it was simply the wine.
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly Page 22
