The Dead Hand of Sweeney County

by David L. Bradley

  Ellie removed from Carswell was proving to be quite different from the History Lady. As we worked through our pizza and our second pitcher, she started telling jokes she learned as an undergrad. I'd heard almost all of them-- and some were downright dirty--, but her elegant retelling in that beautifully melodic voice painted them with a thick new layer of irony, making each her very own and a new invention. I waited for punchlines I knew and laughed with fresh appreciation when they came.

  “So where to now?” she asked when all the pizza was gone.

  “Across the street to Tailfins,” I pointed. “Two great rockabilly bands: Bad Motor Scooter and Black Velvet Elvis.”

  “Let's go.”

  Junior and Kat carded her, which made Ellie howl with laughter as she reached for her ID. They both flashed approving grins as I passed. We danced and drank until we were sweaty, then kept dancing at her insistence. We danced all through Bad Motor Scooter's frenetic, high-speed show, and we danced through most of Black Velvet Elvis, including that great belly-rubber, “I Can't Help Falling in Love With You,” which they played as a finale. Loudly enough that only she could hear, I sang along in my best Elvis voice as we drifted lazily across the floor.

  “Like the river flows, surely to the sea,

  Darling, so it goes; some things were meant to be.”

  Ellie smiled. I smiled. We kissed on the dance floor, something I couldn't remember doing since high school. Then it was time to go home, where we kissed some more.

  I awoke, because I felt something wrong. I opened my eyes and didn't see anything. I lifted my head and looked across Ellie's backside to the top of the spiral stairs in time to think I saw movement there. But that didn't make sense, because Ellie was still asleep next to me. Then I heard the door slam downstairs, so I got out of bed and walked to the window. My eyes focused in time to make out Rita's Honda backing away. I sighed and looked back at the bed where Ellie lay sleeping. I got back into bed, snuggled up behind her, and pulled the covers over us both.

  We awoke and made love. We showered and dressed, and while I was putting on my sneakers, Ellie sat in the reading spot and picked up my Twain.

  “You're one of a kind, mister. You've got this rugged exterior, and inside is a guy with a room set up for reading. Where are the video games?”

  “They're not much fun to play alone.”

  “That's not it. You're a book nerd. Go to college. Read books and write about what they mean. You'll love it.”

  “I'm thinking about it,” I lied. “Come on, I want you to meet Veronica.”

  At the kitchen door, I knocked. “Just being polite,” I explained. I opened the door, and we stepped inside. “Veronica?” I called.

  “Painting. There's a pot of coffee on, if you'd like some. That goes for you, too, Eleanor.”

  “I did tell her about meeting you,” I shrugged. “Coffee?”

  We brought our coffees back to the studio. Veronica was mixing colors on a palette. On the easel was the canvas I'd seen weeks before. The uneven line had become a skyline somewhere in the Arab world. At the forefront stood an Arab woman in traditional dress, her hair covered. At her knees, a toddler boy hugged her legs, pulling her clothes tight against her body and accentuating very feminine curves beneath her garments. It was her eyes, though, that demanded your full attention. They glittered green, silently communicating a depth, a mystery, and a sincerity rarely found in real people and, in my experience, even more rarely reproduced with such faithfulness by any artist in any medium, clothed or naked.

  “Mother Sarah,” Veronica said.

  “Wife of Abraham? Mother of Isaac?” Ellie asked.

  “The first Jewish mother. I took a few years off her.”

  “I wish I'd seen that in my illustrated Bible,” was all I could think, so I said it.

  They both granted me a sideways glance before continuing their conversation.

  “Addison said you were a professor?”

  “English, literature and composition.”

  “How long have you been painting?”

  “Since I got the first Craft Master paint-by-number kit for Christmas when I was sixteen. Off and on. More since I retired. Do you like it?”

  “I love it. I love her. Do you have more? Oh, of course you do. Oh, these are fabulous, Veronica, but you probably know that. They're just beautiful. You could sell some of these, I'm sure.”

  “Well thank you very much. And how about you? I know your job. Are you working on a dissertation idea? Are you planning on getting any more school?”

  “I've thought about it. I have a little money saved.”

  “Do it,” Veronica said. “You only live once. Well, this is a fine thing. My kids are mad at me, because I won't move to an old folks home, or tower, or complex, or some other staging area for the soon-to-be-the-late. My daughter doesn't understand my painting, and my son thinks it's weird that I have a single man living here with me. He thinks you're gay,” she said, looking at me. “I should adopt you two.”

  I know Veronica meant the best when she said that, but once she said it, it stuck in my brain for awhile. I didn't talk about it to Ellie while I drove her back to her car in the woods. We said our goodbyes there.

  They began with a long kiss. “Okay, okay,” she said at one point. “I should probably just go now.”

  “Mrs. Dr.--”

  “Enough of that, please. I honestly don't know what I'm doing, Addison. I am who I am, and I have commitments that must come before anything else, so--”

  “I understand. Thanks for calling me, and if you have any more free time--”

  “Please let me finish. I have commitments, but as soon as I have time, I will check into William Thornton Conley and see what I can find on him. As for us, again, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm not sure what I've done, but I want you to know that I have no regrets. Okay? If we don't see each other again except at the Tavern, I want you to know that. A woman could really fall for you. You're dangerous in your own way.”

  “Says you,” I said. “Ellie, I think I--” I almost said it. Almost. So fucking close. I still could at that point. She waited for me to finish my sentence. “I think I'll try emailing that guy again about Ramon,” I said. “You heard what Lawyer Frank said. We have to help the boy, whoever he is.”

  With another kiss, I was off to buy some gas with my own money and think. Ellie and Veronica's mutual admiration and Veronica's comment about adopting us had my mind going. I wanted to wake up next to Ellie every day for the rest of my life, forsaking all others. No doubt. Period. It was not very likely to happen. At all. Period. I tried holding both ideas in my head simultaneously to see how that felt. The grinding of gears was horrendous. Suddenly Rita's mind appeared as an extra cog, and the machinery ground to a total stop.

  It felt bad, but it wasn't my fault. I honestly wished she hadn't seen us, but she did come up unannounced. After all, I was honest when I told her that I was thinking about having kids, but I didn't tell her I was seeing someone else already. The forces were in perfect equilibrium. The result was inertia, a mind stuck in neutral. At least the gears stopped grinding.

  14. The Arborist and the Caretaker

  The next day at seven, Mike was on my ass to start the tree count.

  “That County Arborist is calling me to get it done,” he said. “He's pressuring me; I'm pressuring you.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Do you want just a tree count or a topo, too?”

  “Hell yes, we want a topo. No telling what they want to do with that property. As long as we're there, let's get as much data as we can. Your points are tight,” he said, handing me the job folder. He meant he had officially processed the GPS data I'd collected and couldn't find anything to bitch about. “Leave that alone for awhile and get this done.”

  Steve asked what he'd missed the week before, and I started to tell him, but when I got to part about being invited back for a second night, he stopped me.

  “Wait, there's a second night?” />
  “Is there a-- My brother, on the second night, she--”

  “Wait! Just wait. Save it for later. One thing at a time. Big house, you say. Nekkid in the pool. With drinks in hand. Eatin' dinner nekkid. You lucky bastard. You lucky, lucky bastard. I'll let you know when I'm ready for the second night.”

  We arrived at the Old Home Lot and set up our equipment for one of a surveyor's simplest and most difficult assignments. A topo survey makes a picture of the topography: all the bumps, lumps, draws, creeks, and changes in the earth's surface. The world becomes a bunch of lines and polygons, and all you have to do is take shots at the points that describe the lines and polygons. The assignment is simple: map all you see. The execution can get complicated. Each point in space is part of a sequence of its own, and each sequence must be identified just so, and each point's number, likewise. There's so much going on while you do it that you can easily lose track of all the details. Sometimes I can't even remember what I've shot until I look at the printout.

  I made two decisions before we arrived: to break up the property into sections to help me keep track of the count, and to start on the west side. The plot is a square, six hundred feet by six hundred, and I decided to divide it into roughly hundred-foot slices. We started at the edge of the woods and walked in 34 steps, roughly a hundred feet, then stopped and tied blue flagging around the closest tree. We kept fifty feet apart from each other, so before long we had an uneven but clear line of blue-flagged trees marking the first section. Starting at the south, at the road, I would work my way northward, counting, identifying, and marking with chalk every tree along the way. Once we finished this strip, we'd repeat the process with different-colored flagging.

  Steve's job is to stand behind the instrument, using its optics to find me and focus on the target atop my rod. When he takes a shot, the electronic distance meter shoots a beam of light to the prism atop the rod in my hand. The prism bounces the beam around and reflects it from the center of the prism back to the instrument, which records the angle and distance to each tree. Using a little keypad, Steve records the species and diameter at breast height. It all happens in seconds. It's a ruby laser, so try to avoid looking down the barrel of a modern survey instrument.

  We began at the southwestern corner of the property, and before long, I had worked my way into the pine thicket. Pines are opportunists, the first trees to sprout on unattended land. Any vacant lot of the poorest red clay will sprout them within five years. The seedlings come up as thick as pigweed, crowding each other in competition for sunlight. Those that lose the race die where they stand and are soon covered in vines: wisteria, blackberry, honeysuckle, muscadine, and kudzu. Ultimately the pines will cut off all light to the floor, and the forest floor will open up as the undergrowth dies off, but during the transition stage the area under those successful young pines is entirely unwalkable cover for snakes, rabbits, and foxes. Moving through it was strenuous and slow. Working our butts off, by the end of the day we had not even covered the first hundred-foot strip, and I had had enough.

  “Ouch! Another damned rose growing wild, Steve,” I spoke into the Motorola. “What do you think of that?”

  “That's the fifth one, isn't it? Right there in the pines?” came the reply.

  “It is.”

  “Want me to get a shot on it?”

  “Sure, why not? We shot the others, didn't we? Let's drown Mike in data. Then let's get these three trees right here by me and call it a day.”

  I extracted myself from the thicket and walked to the truck. Steve was already there, storing equipment.

  “Damn, Addie. Looks like they got you good.”

  I looked down. Burnt-sienna scratches raked across my forearms at crazy angles, leaking sienna rivulets that had already dried crusty.

  “Yeah, it happens. Pine thickets.”

  “Hold on; I'll get you some medicinals.”

  “Save it, Steve. Looks like we have company.”

  A black Navigator had appeared over the hill and was racing toward us.

  “Think it's the arborist?” Steve asked.

  “I hope not.”

  The Navigator pulled onto the shoulder and parked behind the truck. Out stepped Dick Polk, the Turd.

  “You the County Arborist?” I asked.

  “Richard Polk at your service, sir! County Arborist for Sweeney County. How's the tree count going?”

  “Just got started this morning. I spent a lot of time in that pine thicket back there, so we didn't cover a lot of ground today.”

  “Pines, you say? How many and what kind?”

  “Loblollies, maybe fifteen or twenty feet high. Buttloads. Wild seeded, of course.” That meant they weren't planted in straight rows, as they are on a tree farm.

  “Of course. Still, lumber's lumber. You guys know where you are? What used to be here?”

  “Do tell,” I said.

  “This was once the Conley plantation. One of Sweeney County's great families, for awhile. It's hard to say exactly what went wrong. Up 'til the war they and the Polks were the biggest cotton planters in the county. After the war, Captain Fin Conley moved to New York. Nobody ever knew why. His daddy and his son ran things in his absence, but then old Colonel Conley died, and a few years later, Thornton Conley was crippled for life. A nigger named Crazy Isaac tried to kill him by swinging an ax at him from behind. Fin Conley came back from New York then and stayed until he died in the Spanish Flu epidemic, right here... well, up where the house was.”

  “Did Thornton have a family?”

  “He did. He was married, and they had two children that lived, a daughter and a son. The son left home to join the circus and never came back, so when Thornton died, Elizabeth, the daughter, inherited everything. She had one son who inherited all she had, but he left this area in World War Two, and from what I hear, he was not the marrying type, if you know what I mean. So there you go. One of Sweeney's great families faded into nothing. The Colonel was a fine old man, they say, and Thornton was a good man, but that Fin Conley was something else. He thought he was gonna beat my great-granddaddy in the cotton business and push Yankee ideas on Sweeney County. Well, we held on to our principles, and now who's driving the wagon, as great-granddaddy used to say?”

  “Looks like the Polks are,” I said.

  “We've been managing this Land Trust property since 1968, and that's all we're allowed to do: manage it. We take in rents and pay taxes, but nobody in the county can develop the land. Not for another two weeks. Less. A week from Friday, all this property will be up for grabs, and we intend to do most of the grabbing. I am particularly fond of this tract, myself.”

  “This lot?”

  “Oh yes. It's overgrown now, but there's a terrific view of the valley from the top of that hill, just behind these trees.”

  “I've seen it,” I told him. “It is quite a view. Of course, it would make a great park, too. Put some trails through here, maybe some plaques about county history... Yep. It'd be a great park.”

  “A park?” He seemed to be thinking it over, as if he'd never heard of the idea. “Hmm. You know, I think you're right. It would make a fine location for a county park, but it's really kind of small for a park. It would make a much better home site. Look, I could put the pool over there where those pines are. Maybe take down a few of these trees to improve the view. I mean, that's fair, right?” he smiled at us. “The best family in the county should have the best view, right? Maybe we could have the county move the road back where it used to be, higher on the ridge... Or maybe not. Have to think about it. We'll see. It's what, a week and four days?”

  “Heck, today's over,” Steve inserted. “Call it a week and three days.”

  Dick the Turd smiled even more broadly. “A week and three days. I like the sound of that. I'd like a copy of your data when you've completed the tree count.”

  “Would you like me to drop it by your office?”

  “Yes, that would be fine. If no one is there, just leave it with the
bank manager. She's my wife.”