The Rock Hole

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “Did Griffin say who they’re going to talk to tomorrow?”

  “Nossir. I guess they’re gonna poke around some.”

  “Humm,” Ned stood on shaky knees, picked up his hat.

  Cody put the fresh bottle on the table amid the empties. “Don’t run off. Stay and I’ll fry us some taters or something for supper. I’d appreciate the company.”

  “Aw, I reckon I need to go. Come go with me.”

  “Nope. I gotta stay here and feed the dogs. I’m fixin’ to go to the club. I need to be there before six tonight. By the way, did you come by here for anything else in particular?”

  “Naw. I’ve dropped by a few times at night when I didn’t think you’d be at work and missed you. You were probably with Norma.”

  “I guess I was. Hey, I need to get them kids again soon. I still owe them a camping trip.”

  “Not ’til I find out who’s killing folks around here.” Ned looked Cody squarely in the eye and was startled to find he’d forgotten they were blue, like his. “I want to keep them close to home.”

  “I know what you mean. Let me know what else I can do.”

  “I will.” Ned put his hat on and left.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I still don’t like to talk about it much, but the last week of spring brought bad news from Dallas. The Highway Patrol came to the house and told Grandpa it looked like Mama completely lost her senses near Terrell, where Daddy was taking her to the hospital.

  Mama started to slip a little after I was born. Until I was seven or eight, she acted funny sometimes. There were times she’d stay in bed all day. The days stretched into a week or two at a time as I got older. Dad took her to the hospital in Terrell, where they helped people with mental problems.

  After I got older and knew what was going on, Dad talked with me about living with Miss Becky and Grandpa Ned. I didn’t mind, because everything was usually tense at the house in Dallas, and I liked being in Center Springs. Then one day Dad told me I’d be living with them until Mama got all right.

  I reckon she never did, because one day she opened the car door at seventy miles an hour. In the struggle to keep her in the seat, Dad lost control of the Galaxy and went into the ditch, flipping over several times before coming to rest upside down.

  There was nothing for the rescuers to do to save them when they arrived. Grandpa brought them back to be buried beside kinfolk.

  I can’t remember much of what I did during those few days. I think my mind shut down. I was sad, but there were no tears, and that made a lot of people wonder about me. They visited with Miss Becky or Grandpa, talking in soft tones in the living room.

  It was a hot spell and everyone was wet from sweating. I remember being hugged a lot while other people wanted me to eat. I barely remember the funeral, except the same little church was packed full and cars lined the highway once again.

  Back at the house, I lay down on my bed to look out the window while the adults visited. As the sun went down, the older folks went outside under the sycamores and talked until well after dark. The skeeters must have finally run them in, and I heard talking inside.

  Pepper came in to lay beside me. We istened to the whippoorwills in the pasture.

  Mr. O.C. joined the adults still sitting in the living room. I recognized his voice. After a spell they reached some sort of decision. Miss Becky brought two pieces of coconut pie to the bedroom and put them on the dresser. She sat on the edge of the bed and stroked my hair. Grandpa Ned and Mr. O.C. shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot in the hall.

  Grandpa cleared his throat. “Top, do you like it here?”

  The question sounded strange, but adults often did things that didn’t make sense to kids. Pepper listened without saying anything for once.

  “Sure.”

  “Well, I believe we’d like for you to stay here with us.”

  Miss Becky nodded and nervously picked at a stray thread on the bedspread.

  Of course I planned to stay with them. I couldn’t go back to Dallas. I had no intention of living anywhere else. “That’ll be all right.”

  Miss Becky started sniffling, and she rubbed my head some more.

  “Good.” Grandpa stood a little straighter. Mr. O.C. grunted from the hall and left. Grandpa looked around the bedroom. “All right, then.” He shuffled from one foot to the other for a few seconds like he didn’t know what to do, then he left the room and Miss Becky fluffed a pillow for a minute before following him.

  Pepper grinned at me and scratched my back. After a while we sat cross-legged on the bed and ate the pie. I heard Grandpa and Mr. O.C. in the yard as they walked to the cars.

  “Looks like you and Becky have a grandboy to raise.”

  “I reckon.”

  “I’ll have the papers ready for you tomorrow morning. Y’all can come by the courthouse, and we’ll get everything signed.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for everything you’ve done.”

  “Aw, you know I’d do anything for y’all.”

  “I know it. Come back and see us.” I recognized Grandpa’s footsteps on the porch, and he and Miss Becky went back to visiting with the folks who were still there.

  I learned about custody papers much later. The next day I became a permanent citizen of Center Springs. As the days passed, my pain eased a little at a time until it faded into the past.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The warm spell continued and us kids began to get jittery. The only way to scratch the itch was to get out from underfoot.

  Grandpa would have taken a belt and worn our butts to a frazzle had he known Pepper and I planned to go stringing off on the day of the Incident. I don’t think we really snuck out, more like we decided to get out of the house for a while before we went nuts.

  He was up at the store, watching the fun as Neal Box cleaned out half his stock and burned it in a big bonfire in the pasture beside the store. The night before, Ty Cobb’s dogs spotted a skunk slipping under the store as Jimmy Foxx pulled into the parking lot between it and the domino hall. Being hunting dogs, they jumped over the side when the pickup stopped and dived in after it. When the battle under those floorboards was over, the skunk was dead, but not before he gave both dogs a good healthy spray.

  Everybody loafing around the domino hall whooped it up at the fight and had even more fun when the gagging dogs jumped back into the pickup, trying to rub the yellow skunk spray off on anything they could find. Doing what was right, Ty Cobb crawled up under the store and drug out the dead skunk, getting dosed pretty good himself in the spray sticking to the ground and the floor joists. The smell broke up the game, and everyone left the domino hall before ten o’clock.

  They left to get rid of the skunk and wash the dogs, but no one thought much about the inside of the store until the next morning when Neal opened the doors and the smell hit him. Anything not in cans was ruined, so while most of the Spit and Whittle club watched, Neal burned everything from bread to the candy from the oak cases to brand new shirts and jeans. It took several months for the smell to finally go away, and whenever the humidity went up, the store smelled skunky.

  Pepper spent the night with us and planned to stay all day. With Grandpa gone, Miss Becky took advantage of the good weather, and as soon as we got up, she had me pry the nails out of the frames and open the windows to air out the house.

  I fetched the hammer like she said, but I wasn’t convinced opening the windows was a good idea. “What about the Skinner?”

  “It’s bright daylight and I doubt if a crazy person is gonna come up here to get us while the sun is shining. We’ll nail them back up tonight, after the house breathes for a while. Now, y’all help me move this mattress.”

  She stripped the beds, and we helped move the floppy cotton mattresses through the front room and out into the yard to sun. It was like moving a dead calf through the house.

  Neither of us had any intention of being drafted into housework, so when Miss Becky grabbed a broom to start cleaning
, we made other plans. Pepper stuffed two sticks of crackers and some rat cheese into a muslin bag, and I locked Hootie in the corncrib so he couldn’t follow us.

  I knew it would be snaky where we were going, and I didn’t want him to get bit by no moccasin while we looked for arrowheads. I’d seen snake-bit dogs, and knew it was a horrible way to die. Going to a vet was out of the question, because it cost too much money.

  I grabbed my BB gun, though, in case we did see a snake.

  Daddy told me Indians once camped and hunted along Center Spring Branch not far from Grandpa’s house. They traded with the settlers and hunted up and down the clear, cold stream that never dried up in the summertime. When he was our age, he and his cousins found enough arrowheads along the banks to use in their slingshots. He said they were second only to smooth, round rocks for shooting targets.

  It didn’t take us long to cut south through the pasture to the branch. It was good to be free of the farm, and we felt like a couple of colts kicking up our heels. When we got there, Pepper hung the bag of snacks from a nearby shady limb.

  “We’ll get a whipping if they find us gone.”

  I shot at a frog. “They won’t catch us. They’ll think we’re down at the pool. We’ll get back before they holler.”

  We found a rusty can, so I set it up against the bank and we shot up half my BBs. I showed Pepper how to adjust for distance, and she did pretty good for a girl.

  She had her slingshot, and when we tired of the gun we practiced flinging the smoothest rocks we could find. While she was looking for pebbles, Pepper saw an arrowhead. “There’s one!” She jumped across the narrow stream and picked it up. She was disappointed to find the tip broken off.

  I was secretly glad. “Stay over there on the girl side of the branch. You look on yours and I’ll look on mine.”

  “You’re just jealous because you’re afraid I’ll find another one before you do.

  “Uh, huh!”

  I was walking with my head down, carefully watching the gravel and wishing I could find one.

  “Look, another one!” she shouted.

  I started wondering if an Indian had lost a bag of arrowheads, if they carried them in bags at all. “There must have shot targets around here like we done.” I kicked at a riffle of sand at the edge of the water and stopped. Instead of an arrowhead, I found something most people would give their eyeteeth for…a spear point.

  In disbelief, I reached into the wet sand and gravel and pulled out the point. “Look.” I could see where a groove was carved to tie it onto a rawhide handle.

  Pepper splashed across the stream, not caring if she got her feet wet. “Shitfire. I can’t believe you found that.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “You want to trade?”

  “Not on your life.” After examining it for a good while, I put the point in the back pocket of my jeans. “Get back on your side.”

  We kept going, walking slowly along the edge of the stream. Our luck must have run out, because for the next long while we didn’t find anything else. Then Pepper stopped at the edge of a plum thicket and pointed at the gravel. “Hey, look at this footprint. Somebody’s been here today.”

  “Wonder who? Nothing is in season right now, so there shouldn’t be anyone hunting.” I saw water seeping into the deeper heel print.

  “Bet it’s Walt Simms or maybe the Wilson twins. Maybe they came through here last night.”

  “Nope. Somebody made this print a few minutes ago. ” I was suddenly scared. Anyone on decent business would have heard us coming and hollered to let us know he was there. The fact that they had gone on was an indication that we needed to get our little butts out of there right then.

  “Let’s go back. We left the crackers and cheese back there, and now I’m getting hungry.”

  Pepper looked suddenly scared also. “Good ide…” she began, when an arm shot out of a thick bush behind her and grabbed her around the neck. Before I could say a word, she was yanked out of sight with a gagging sound.

  I’d never been so scared in my life, and I didn’t know what to do. Everything inside my head screamed run, but my cousin had simply disappeared right before my eyes.

  “Pepper?” I could hear thrashing in the leaves behind the bush. I needed to go around to the other side and find out what was going on, but terror held me firm. I suddenly lost my breath. “Pepper?”

  The bush before me literally exploded. Limbs and leaves leaped forward. Up to then I’d forgotten the BB gun in my hands, but without a thought I leveled it and pulled the trigger. I heard the crack of air and a sudden painful hissing sound before I landed on my back so hard it knocked the breath out of me. I looked up through the leaves to see mare’s tails sweeping across at the blue sky and remembered Grandpa always said those kinds of clouds meant rain.

  A bush shaped like a man straddled me. I wondered how a bush could turn into a man, and then everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  After his conversation with Ned, John seriously considered the possibility that the killer could be a black man. He was on his own when it came to investigating the murders of colored people. The white Law sounded good when they talked about catching the killer, but everyone from John’s side of the tracks knew it was only lip service. Ned was the only person he knew who worried about coloreds the same as whites.

  John needed more information and more eyes helping his investigation. He left the courthouse and drove across the tracks, leaving solid concrete for broken blacktop and the local barbershop. Ragged trees full of broken and dead limbs lined the streets of peeling clapboard houses, a stark contrast to the well manicured streets of nearby Bonham Street.

  Some houses were only shacks, while others had porches. Few had grass in the dusty yards. John passed several boarded-up houses, once honky-tonks that One-Arm George shut down. Scattered throughout, though, were neat little homes that defied the neighborhood.

  He parked in a shady yard by a “colored only” sign hand lettered in red paint. He grinned. Everything in that part of town was colored only. He joined his friends on the sagging porch.

  “Gentlemen.” John shook Ed Corley’s hand with a loud slap, then worked his way around the group the same way. He took an empty chair beside the porch. He and Ed had been friends since boyhood, when both of their families made a living working the fields. By the time the young men turned eighteen, both John and Ed knew they’d do anything not to spend their lives working for pennies a day in the hot sun.

  Ed opened his pocketknife and began shaving a piece of soft red cedar into a toothpick. “Taken anybody to jail today?”

  “Naw. Know anybody needs to go?”

  “’Bout a dozen, I reckon.”

  Ed chuckled, finished shaving his toothpick, and began to work on his teeth. “You still on them poor younguns was killed here while back?”

  “Yep.”

  “I think you got your hands full with The Skinner.”

  John crossed his arms. “You’re right, but lordy, I hate that name. None of this makes sense. First somebody cuts up animals for two or three years, they stop for a while and then they start in again before stealing and killing people.”

  “It’s the Devil hisself down in them bottoms,” Reverend Sanders boomed from the barber chair Tom Hubbard had moved out of the house and onto the porch to better catch the soft afternoon breeze. He’d already decided to move back inside after he finished with the Reverend, because he smelled rain. “The old Devil comes out to do meanness of his own every now and then. I believe he gets tired of working through other folks and likes to get his hands bloody hisself.”

  John recalled the advertisement Ned found under Cody’s mutilated dog. “Why would he want to kill young people too?”

  “’Cause they pure and he don’t want no purity on the face of this earth.” The Reverend switched to his deep bass sermon voice. “He’ll defile what’s good and leave the evil to roam at will, spreading hurt, disease and pestilence th
roughout the land.”

  “Proves why you’re still here cutting hair,” Ed told Tom, and everyone laughed.

  The Reverend frowned. “It ain’t no laughing matter Brother Ed. Folks is gettin’ away from the church and that leaves more room for the Devil to work. Our troubles are coming home to roost with this skinnin’.”

  “Be still before I notch your ear.” Tom waited for Brother Ed to settle down and then shaved his neck with a well honed straight razor.

  “The problem here is there ain’t nobody heard nothin’.” Big John opened his pocket knife to clean under his fingernails with the largest blade. “This meanness can’t be kept completely quiet. Somebody has to know something. I’m wondering if there’s people keeping things to themselves because The Skinner is his own kin.”

  From inside the house, a soft voice quivering with age stopped the discussion as if were a shout. “I believe I know who he is.” Jules, the courthouse elevator man, liked to sit by the still warm woodstove.

  Even Tom stopped cutting.

  After a lifetime of standing in the elevator in relative invisibility to white folks, Jules had become used to listening to everyone’s conversations instead of talking. If and when he finally spoke, folks generally took notice.

  “What do you know, Mister Jules?” Big John leaned forward so he could see through the door.

  “Las’ night I heard a racket out behind my house, some’eres around ’leven o’clock I reckon, and I stuck my head outside to see what was the matter. I thought a possum might be after my chickens, but I seen somebody trying to get my back screen off, and I hollered and he run off.”