Down by the Riverside

by Jackie Lynn

  Lucas walked over to his trailer and then pulled around the truck. He honked the horn and I joined him. We took off down the driveway and out of the campground. I rolled down the window and stuck out my arm.

  “So, little sister, did you get any rest?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, but it’s okay. I’m sure I’ll get to sleep a couple of hours tonight,” I said.

  He nodded and turned the knob on his radio. He found a country station.

  “So, you and Thomas?” he asked, not completely finishing the question, but making very clear what it was that he was fishing for.

  I realized that news traveled faster at Shady Grove than it did at the hospital where I had worked. We turned onto the paved road, past the railroad tracks, and beside the oil tanks.

  I smiled. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Tom’s a good man,” he said, driving ahead and then stopping at the intersection and looking in both directions before traveling on.

  “So I’ve heard,” I replied, remembering those exact words that Mary had used earlier that day.

  He hummed to the song on the radio. I felt awkward having the conversation, especially knowing what I had just learned. I felt for the coin. It was still in my pocket.

  “There’s nobody I trust more than Thomas Sawyer,” he said, causing me to wonder about his marriage and why he would trust someone more than his wife.

  As if he could read my mind, he added, “Rhonda feels the same way.”

  I nodded without a reply.

  “How long have the two of you known each other?” I asked, thinking maybe he could shed some light on the man I thought I loved.

  “We served in Vietnam together,” Lucas replied. “We went on the same day and signed up for duty.” He merged into the traffic going over the bridge.

  “We both knew we were getting in over our heads.” He waved at the car behind him.

  “Anyway,” he said, as if he didn’t care sorting through those days, as if there was pain in those memories, “Thomas has been a good friend to me and Rhonda.”

  I didn’t say anything. I just wondered what Lucas knew about Tom’s relationship with Lawrence, what he knew about his interest and acquisition of the gold coin, if perhaps the three of them, Lucas, Rhonda, and Thomas were in this together.

  “Who owns the quarry next to the campground?” I asked, quickly changing the subject, remembering seeing it as I walked over to Thomas’s from the campground. I was curious about the property.

  “I do,” he answered. “But I lease it to the Kunar family. They had the quarry there before I bought the land to develop into Shady Grove, so I just let them keep the property, pay me a little rent every year. I get my gravel free.”

  I turned to see the river flowing behind us. There were a couple of barges coming toward Tennessee. The bridge took us farther away from the campground.

  “Thomas own his land?” I asked.

  Lucas shook his head. “No.” Then he glanced over to me.

  “Why all this interest in land ownership, little sister?” he asked.

  I smiled. “Just wondering is all.” Then I added, “I mean, I just was curious why Tom never bought his own property.”

  “It’s not for lack of opportunity,” Lucas said with a laugh. “I offered to give it to him when I bought Shady Grove,” he added.

  I was surprised. “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “Because it’s like I told you, there’s nobody I’d trust more than that man, and besides it was him who helped me get the property.”

  “Oh?” I replied, now very interested.

  The breeze felt good, so I angled myself against the door so that my head and shoulders were mostly out the window.

  “Tom cosigned with Ms. Lou Ellen for Shady Grove. I’d never have been able to get the loan without his help.”

  There wasn’t much traffic on the interstate and we enjoyed a leisurely pace.

  “Having just gotten out of prison and with a fairly long record at the county courthouse; let’s just say the banks were not interested in backing my real-estate ventures.”

  We exited off the interstate and headed into downtown Memphis.

  “Lucas, were Tom and Lawrence Franklin close friends?” I asked. I knew what Tom had said and what Ms. Eulene had said, now I just wanted another opinion.

  We stopped at the light.

  “Tom’s friendly with mostly everyone,” he answered. “Most everybody who knows him considers him a friend.” He seemed to be thinking about the question.

  “But close friends?” He turned in the direction of the hospital. “I don’t think Tom gets very close to people,” he said.

  I wondered what this meant.

  “Yeah, but you say you trust him completely,” I replied. “How can you trust somebody that doesn’t let people get close to them?”

  We headed around the back of the hospital toward the visitor’s parking garage.

  “Trusting somebody isn’t always about being close to them,” he answered as he looked around trying to find the entrance.

  “When you really trust a person you don’t have to be intimate with them,” he added, then continued as he found the right direction to take, “Thomas Sawyer has already proven himself to me more times than I can count. I don’t need to be with him all the time to know the kind of man he is.”

  He pulled into the garage, stopped, rolled down his window, and pulled a ticket out of the meter.

  “To answer your question though, I do know that Thomas cared about Lawrence. They had grown up together, gone to school together. Sure, they were friends, and they were working on some historical project.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, trying to find out what Lucas knew. “What was that about?” I asked as we pulled into a parking space.

  “Mr. Franklin was looking for some burial site,” he answered, repeating the same story I had now heard from three people.

  “Thomas was helping him.” He got out of his side and we walked around the truck.

  “They ever find what they were searching for?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “I don’t know, little sister,” he replied. “I don’t know what anybody is really searching for,” he added, looking at me with a suspicious eye.

  I let his statement pass without a reply.

  “I do know that Thomas Sawyer is a fine and upstanding man, and if he’s your choice for a beau, then you couldn’t have found a nicer person.”

  He opened the glass door that led to the stairwell. I walked through and we headed down to the second floor where we entered the hospital lobby and made our way to the elevator. We rode two floors up without any further conversation.

  The door was closed, so we knocked first and then we walked into the room and found Rhonda painting Ms. Lou Ellen’s toenails. At first, Rhonda spun around, trying to cover up what she was doing. When she saw it was us, she blew out a breath and continued her task.

  They had chosen a very bright red polish. The patient was sitting up slightly in the bed, but was still fairly groggy from her recent operation.

  “She said they had to be done now.” Rhonda rolled her eyes at us. “They took off what she had on before they did surgery.”

  She was almost finished. Two toes were left.

  “I’ve had my nails painted every summer for more than fifty years,” Ms. Lou Ellen said with a drowsy Southern accent. “I’m not about to stop having them polished now just because my hip is out of joint.”

  “I suppose the nurses don’t know about this,” I said, quite sure that they were the ones who removed the polish to start with. With surgery, the color of toenails can provide important information about blood circulation.

  “No, they don’t know about it,” Rhonda said in exasperation. “I’ve had to sneak the polish in and now sneak it on. Honestly, I haven’t been this deceptive since I was dropping acid.”

  Lucas laughed. “Oh, little sister,” he even called his wife by that name. He
went over and hugged her.

  “Be careful, Lucas Boyd!” The shout came from the patient.

  He stepped back in fear that he had somehow wounded the older woman.

  “She’s terrible at this already. If you start getting in her way, I’ll have Spurned Cherry all over my bed.”

  I laughed and moved carefully over to the chair by the patient’s side. I set my bag beside the bedside table and sat down. Lucas eased over next to me, carefully so as not to shake the bed or unsettle his wife.

  “Ya’ll are here early,” Rhonda said as she finished the last toe.

  Ms. Lou Ellen closed her eyes.

  “I figured you had been here long enough,” I whispered. “Besides, I didn’t have anything else to do this afternoon.”

  Rhonda put the tiny brush back in the bottle and twisted it shut. Then she reached over and grabbed a magazine and began fanning her mother’s feet.

  I checked the patient’s IV bag and her lines. Everything looked fine.

  “How’s the care here?” I asked.

  “They’ve been real good,” she answered. “I’ve just now been able to get these toes done because somebody has come in every fifteen or twenty minutes.” She kept fanning. Then she stopped and blew on them.

  “Did you go to St. Jude’s?” Rhonda asked me. She knew that was where I was heading when I left that morning.

  I nodded.

  “It’s not good?” she asked as if she had already heard the news.

  I shook my head. “Jolie died this morning.”

  “Lord, bless ’em,” Lucas said, and he and Rhonda bowed their heads.

  “Amen,” Lucas said after a few minutes.

  Rhonda jerked her head up and started fanning again.

  “Amen,” Ms. Lou Ellen said, and then fell back to sleep.

  “We’ll need to do something for that nice family, Lou,” Rhonda said, speaking to her husband.

  He nodded.

  “There’s already a ton of food that Ms. Eulene Franklin gave us when she heard.”

  “How did she hear?” Rhonda asked. She touched the shiny red nail of her mother’s big toe.

  “I told her,” I said. “I went over to meet Ms. Eulene after I was at the hospital.”

  Rhonda nodded. She pulled the sheet over her mother’s feet.

  A nursing assistant walked in about that time with a tray of food. She sniffed the air.

  “Is that nail polish I smell?” she asked.

  Rhonda shook her head innocently. “I think it’s the cleaning fluid,” she said.

  She made a huffing noise. “They use the smelliest stuff,” the attendant reported, and then walked out the door, closing it behind her.

  Rhonda raised her eyebrows at me and I laughed. I noticed the clock, thinking that four thirty was fairly early for dinner, but then I realized that the patient probably hadn’t had anything to eat all day.

  Rhonda lifted the cover on the tray. It was broth and Jell-O and a small cup of ice. She put down the cover, deciding it wasn’t worth waking her mother for.

  We sat for about an hour and talked about the surgery and the prognosis and then I noticed Rhonda yawn and look at her watch. I could tell that she was tired.

  “Look, Rhonda, you’ve been here all day. You and Lucas go ahead,” I said. “I brought my stuff and I’m going to stay until the morning like I told you,” I added.

  Rhonda seemed reluctant to leave.

  “Have you had dinner, little sister?” Lucas asked.

  I shook my head. “I had lunch at the Franklins’.”

  The couple smiled knowingly.

  “You won’t be hungry then until midnight,” Rhonda said. Then she glanced around the room. “You sure about staying?” She peered at me.

  I nodded.

  “This seems like too much to ask. You already came this morning.” She shook her head. “This is just so nice of you,” she said, gathering up her things and giving them to Lucas.

  “Thank you for today.” She pulled me up from my seat in a big hug.

  I recovered my breath and remained standing next to the bed.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, worried that she would hug me again.

  “Little sister,” Lucas said, “this means a lot to our family.”

  Then I worried that he was going to hug me, too. But he didn’t. He just threw one arm around me. It was still a crushing move.

  “You make sure and call us if you need us.” He pulled his arm away and winked at me.

  “We’ll be fine,” I answered, glancing over to her mother. Ms. Lou Ellen was sleeping soundly.

  “I’ll be back first thing in the morning,” Rhonda said.

  Then she went over and kissed her mother on the cheek.

  She paused. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should stay.”

  “Look, I’m used to third shift and you’re going to need your rest for when she comes home. It’s fine. This is what I do,” I said.

  Rhonda sighed and moved away from the bed. The two of them walked out the door, stepping backward. I walked with them and held open the door.

  “Really, thank you,” Rhonda said again.

  I nodded. “Okay.” I closed the door behind them.

  I checked again the IV lines and the position of the pillows in the bed. I pulled up the sheet and assessed the condition of the bandage. Everything looked fine. I fluffed the sheet around the patient and walked around the bed to sit down beside her. I was glad to have some quiet time to think about everything that had happened that day.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out the gold coin. I held it up to the light and studied it again. I thought that Thomas might have already realized that it was stolen, and that I might find myself in bigger trouble with the sheriff than I was already in.

  Impersonating the family member of a dead person and stealing from a man that I slept with the first night I met him, I was racking up both moral and criminal offenses, and I hadn’t even been away from North Carolina for more than a couple of days. I slipped the coin back in my pocket and stared out the window. I decided to name first the things I did know.

  Lawrence Franklin was extremely interested in finding an old burial ground that was used by his ancestor to bury the bodies of some drowned slaves. He had asked for help from Tom and the city manager. Apparently, he had recently discovered the general area that he thought was the historical site. There was a red grave marker in his jacket pocket.

  He had revealed his findings to his mother, his neighbors, the quarry manager, Tom, the Boyds, and the sheriff. On the day before he was leaving town, he had discovered another important clue, on the day he was planning an early business trip to St. Louis, he disappeared.

  A little girl saw him down by the banks of the Mississippi at the campground sometime after he left his house. And three days after he was declared missing by his mother, they found his body only a few hundred yards from Shady Grove. It was initially ruled as drowning by suicide.

  Evidence of drowning was established, but white sand, not native to the Mississippi River, was found in his airways. A complete autopsy had not yet been rendered. That was what I knew about Mr. Lawrence Franklin.

  The Boyds were a mysterious couple who had served time in prison, owned a campground, and cavorted with ex-criminals. They appeared to have cleaned up their lives, found Jesus, but they had no other known means of income except the campground and they seemed to spend a lot of time boating up and down the river.

  Tom Sawyer was a fisherman who knew a lot about history and geography. He knew the stories of buried gold and of a possible burial site. He lived near the campground and was friends with the deceased and with the Boyds. He was an alcoholic, a veteran, owned no property except his trailer. A gold coin, the same kind he said was what the slave had, was found in his possession. That was what I knew about Tom Sawyer.

  I looked over to Ms. Lou Ellen. She was moving her lips as if she was holding a very important conversation. I turned back to the w
indow, realizing I knew more.

  According to Lucas Boyd, Thomas was an upstanding, trustworthy man. “Thomas Sawyer has proven himself to me more times than I can count,” the campground owner had said, without revealing too many details. And yes, he did know Lawrence, but probably not well.

  Then there was the sheriff, an obnoxious man who kept showing up in the story. He was there when they pulled up the dead man from the river, had the dead man’s jacket taken from the scene, and then gave it to Lawrence’s mother. He was at the emergency room when they brought him in. He kept sending his personnel to the campground, trying to find out more information, and he knew that Lawrence had found the burial site. And, most important, I remembered, he had been very motivated to buy the campground with his brother about a year earlier.

  I let out a deep breath. Ms. Lou Ellen stirred. She turned her head in my direction. More than several hours had past since her surgery.

  “Rose?” she asked. “Is your name Rose?”

  I smiled and stood next to the bed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered. “I met you just yesterday.” I knew the surgery and the pain medicine could make a patient disoriented. “At the campground,” I added.

  She smiled. “I remember you,” she said. Then she yanked aside her sheet and looked down at her toes. “Nice,” she said, drawing out the word into three, maybe four, syllables. She covered her legs back up. Then she turned to face me again.

  “Do you think I might have something to drink?” she asked.

  “Absolutely,” I answered. I walked around the bed and pulled the table in front of her.

  “You have soup and juice and Jell-O,” I said, pulling off the cover to the tray.

  “Yum-yum,” the older woman replied. “How about a little Jell-O?” And she smiled.

  “It’s green,” I said, yanking off the top and picking up the spoon. I took a little and held it to her mouth.