The Dead Hand of Sweeney County

by David L. Bradley

  “I'm sure she would have liked your granny,” Sarah smiled. “Gentlemen, I'll be going now. I'll see you around.”

  We said goodbye, and Steve boxed up the equipment for the day. We looked at each other, each asking the other the same question, and having reached agreement without remarking on it, we turned to walk by the Lynching Tree on our way back to the truck. Minutes later, we stood looking in awed silence.

  “Look at all the bullet holes,” Steve noticed. “And see there and there, where the limbs were sawed off. How many men? Four?”

  “Sarah says possibly five. I guess that would make sense then, huh?

  “What would?” Steve asked.

  “His being here.”

  “Who's bein' here? Who's here?” Steve looked around.

  “This is where the ghost of Isaac is supposed to be seen, right? Under this tree?”

  “Oh yeah. Right.” Steve continued staring at the tree. “But why should it just be Isaac, you know? I used to watch that 'Unsolved Mysteries' with Granny, and their idea of a hauntin' was some weepy old bat pissin' and moanin' around some old Cape Cod house just because her husband went to sea and drowned or got et by a whale or somethin'. Well good Lord, Addie, if the South was haunted by all the thousands of men beaten and lynched? Why, you couldn't hardly walk to the store at night without steppin' on their ghosts.”

  “Who says we're not?.”

  When Ellie called, I was sitting in a pair of baggy swim trunks, sipping on my second beer. I saw who it was before I answered.

  “Yes ma'am,” I said.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Drinking a beer and thinking of you.”

  “Is that some country song?”

  “Just about half of them. The other half are split between Mom, my truck, and the flag.”

  “Sounds fascinating. Want to come over and expound on this thesis of yours?”

  “To your house?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Where's your husband?”

  “Away. Augusta. Don't worry, he's not coming home.”

  “I haven't showered yet.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Don't do either. Just hurry over here. I have news regarding Willie Conley, too.”

  “Yes, ma'am.” Our conversation ended as it had begun.

  She met me on the deck with soap, a towel, and a robe. After she washed me, we swam naked, then ate, then slowly made love, and to this moment, I still don't believe either of us was faking. She smiled several times during the night, and at least once she leaned back and cut loose with that beautiful, chiming laugh of hers, and I think that was real, too. In the few hours between my arrival and departure, I saw the makings of the most perfect woman under the sun, and if she was faking any of it, I admit I was completely fooled.

  As we sat down to dinner, she said, “I did some research on Willie Conley and the circus.”

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. Fascinating, eh?”

  “Fascinating how?”

  “He disappeared in June of 1900, according to his sister. He ran off to join the circus, right? Where?”

  “Atlanta?”

  “It didn't get there until October.”

  “Hmm.”

  “The circus has no Willie or William Conley on its payrolls for that or any other year. The circus wintered in Florida, of course, but I can't find any records in Florida that mention him; at the same time, wherever he died must have been out of state, because Georgia doesn't have a death certificate for him anywhere, either. Of course, he could have died somewhere with no identification and been buried in a potter's field. He could have died in the flu epidemic, or he could have tried hopping the rails and been killed by a train or a railroad cop, or... Who knows? That's what I've found, though. I was going to box it all up for you, but it's a lot of nothing.”

  “Just leave it where it is. I'll know where it is if I need it.”

  Another drink and an hour later, we were lying on our sides. I was examining the near-absolute symmetry of her face, studying the color of her eyes and the distance between them, the ratio between the length of a nose to its rise from the face, the placement of lips and their width, and the optimal distance for a beauty mark, trying to analyze exactly which combination of measurements comprised the perfect female face. I have no idea what she was looking at.

  I asked, “Do you think he's cheating on you?”

  “I don't think about it. I don't want to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don't know what I would do about it, and if I knew he was, I would feel like I had to do something. Does that make sense?”

  “Perfect sense. I won't mention it again.”

  “I think I've decided that if he has a secret, he can keep it. I've got my own secret now.”

  As I was leaving the next morning, I turned around for one last look at her, standing naked at the edge of the deck waving good-bye, and from ground level she looked like a forlorn princess locked up in a luxurious prison. I had to find a way to come back and set her free. I had to.

  16. Pizza Night

  The next day was Thursday. We returned to our tree count, the pace of which had increased considerably once outside the pine thicket. By the end of the day, I could call three-quarters of the property's trees counted.

  “Looks like we're gonna finish this thing after all,” Steve said as we climbed into the Mighty Ford.

  “Despite our best efforts,” I replied. “Let's go get a beer.”

  An hour later I was sitting at the table in our motel room, awaiting a pizza delivery. I had my laptop out and was looking over my data. At that time, the instrument itself only took shots; the data was collected on a detachable device called, curiously enough, a data collector. A cable connected the collector to a computer to download the data, which I could then import into another program to view. The data collector itself had a function that would plot all the stored points, but that's all it showed: points, and trying to view too many of them at once was a surefire way to lock up a data collector in 2002. Importing it into ArcViewGIS allowed me to create topographical maps that were much easier to understand than a bunch of dots with numbers.

  I opened the program and brought in the data, then clicked Redraw. The two GPS points appeared at the bottom, then Thornton's Ferry Road, then the trees themselves and every other feature we'd recorded out there, and suddenly I was looking into the past.

  The old road cut across the northernmost portion of the square, running from northwest to southeast at 110 degrees. The family cemetery sat across this former roadbed from where the main house had stood, the flat, square footprint of the house now clearly visible just west of center of the lot, reached from the old main road via a curved driveway, also clearly visible on the screen. Behind the house and to the southwest was a rectangle of pines I recognized as the thicket, and five randomly-placed rose bushes within its boundaries-- a pink English rose here, a white Cherokee rose there, and various shades of red and yellow-- indicated Ms. Burroughs' award-winning rose garden. At the right of the map, just thirty feet south of the old roadbed, the lynching tree was a three and a half-foot wide circle standing apart from all the rest.

  “Check it out, Steve,” I said, and turned the screen outward. He got up from his bed and took the other chair.

  “Let's see what we've got... Wow. Just like she said, up I come from the river and first there's a family cemetery on the left, then on the right is the family homestead. Now see here? When we were in there shootin' it, I didn't notice the circular drive, but here it is, just plain as day.”

  “You see where the rose garden was?”

  “I sure do.”

  “And where did Sarah say the tree was located?”

  “Well, I'll be damned. Sorry, Granny. Well, bless my soul, there's that big evil sonofabitch right by the road, right where everyone could see it. She was right, wasn't she? At least, her granny
was right. And after they ran the highway two miles to the west, bypassing the Conleys and Thorntons, the Feds drew this east-west line here for the road,” Steve traced with his finger. “Thornton's Ferry Road is so straight through here you could run quarter-miles.”

  “And they did. The week you were gone, I found out that they were running hot rods out at the Conley property the night someone first said he saw Isaac, the ghost. 'Bout the only time anyone saw him, actually. That's how the story got started, a bunch of teenagers out there one night, drinking beer, smoking pot, racing cars--”

  “And tryin' to get laid,” Steve finished with a long sigh. “God, I love this country. Man, if there's any way, we need to save those woods and that dragstrip for future teenagers. It's the right thing to do.”

  “Ten-four, buddy. We have to find Willie Conley or a descendent.”

  “How much time you got left?”

  “A little over a week.”

  “Better get to lookin'.”

  “We've tried. Ellie's still looking.”

  “Y'all need to look harder, or think harder, or something.”

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it?” Steve shouted over his shoulder.

  “Pizza!” a voice shouted.

  “Pizza!” Steve grinned. “Aids the thinkin' process. I'm gonna get me another beer; want one?”

  “Yeah, man,” I said as I reached for my money and opened the door.

  A short retiree in a VFW cap stood there holding my pizza. He looked at the receipt in his hand. “Oh, you guys got the special. Eleven forty-eight, please.”

  I handed him a twenty. “Just give me five back,” I said.

  “Sure, can I put down the pizza?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, opening the door and motioning toward the table. He stepped inside, and I closed my laptop and picked up my whiskey. “Right there is fine,” I said, picking up the laptop with my other hand. The next thing I knew, the door was closed and locked, and the man was holding a gun.

  That's imprecise. The short retiree was holding a Beretta 92, an automatic pistol adopted by the US Army in the Seventies. I know, because I carried one in the Eighties. It looks a lot like the old Colt M1911 .45 my dad strapped on for MP service, but it was the Italian-made specialty clip containing either eighteen or twenty rounds, protruding a barely-noticeable three-quarters of an inch below his pistol grip, that let me know I was in the company of a man with a keen idea of what he was doing.

  “We are blue-collar dogs living on the company dime,” I said, “That twenty I gave you is all the cash I've got.”

  Steve stood with both hands full, one held out in offering. “Beer?” he asked.

  “Do you work for the Farmer's and Merchant's Bank?”

  “No sir,” Steve replied.

  “We specifically hate those bastards, if that helps you any,” I said. Both my hands were full, too, and I wasn't likely to drop or throw either my laptop or my Irish. “Whiskey?” I asked.

  He had a tan face and wore his silver hair high and tight, as if he were still on active duty. He looked from me to Steve and back again. He hadn't shot us yet, which, along with his choice of a custom magazine, confirmed to me that he was not a dangerous man at all, but a professional man with reason to take care.

  “Why did you contact me?” he asked.

  “Why did I-- Sergeant-Major Tyler?” I responded. “I'm looking for Master Sergeant Ramon Burroughs, United States Air Force.”

  He squinted at me. “Why?” he asked.

  “To bring him home to his mother,” I said.

  He looked hard at me another moment, then looked at Steve, then back to me. He sighed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Sit down. Eat. I'll take a beer.”

  After everyone had a beer and a slice in their hands, my first question was, “What did you do to our pizza guy?”

  “Intercepted him on the stairs and paid him for the pizza, what do you think?”

  “Just checking. You still owe me five bucks.”

  “You're a cheap bastard. I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change.”

  He introduced himself as Sergeant-Major John Tyler of the United States Army, retired in 1992, after the first Gulf War. “Airborne Ranger,” he said before a sip of beer. “I am the executor of Ramon's estate.”

  “Where's Ramon?”

  “Cremated. His ashes were scattered off the coast of South Padre Island.”

  “And what estate did he leave behind?” I asked.

  He smiled. “He left me a beautiful home on Pelican Bay. That's... well, you probably know where it is. He left a hole in a community he was part of for twenty-seven years, a community that held him in high esteem. He left behind his LP collection, which I donated to the University of Texas library, a collection of every single Army Air Corps and Air Force uniform issued between 1942 and 1972, which I donated to a museum, a few personal items, a collection of beer mugs, cups, teapots, and bric-a-brac from all around the world, and apparently he left some land here in Georgia.”

  I grinned. “No shit. You are holding the paper to the Conley Land Trust?”

  “I'm glad somebody's amused,” he said. “It’s been nothing but a pain in my ass. Almost three years ago, after I got the Texas property sorted out, I came here to fulfill my obligations. I had to advertise for descendents of Robert Conley, who I understand was Ramon's-- what, great-grandfather?”

  “Great-great,” I said.

  “Right. Ramon and I were friends for twenty years before he died. He told me there were all these properties in Georgia that belonged to his family, and his mother wanted him to keep it in the family and advertise for other Conley descendents, of which he assured me there were none. He'd been advertising in the back of the Augusta paper for years, and all I had to do was keep it up for three more years, then walk away, and that would be that.”

  He took a bite of pizza, chewed it briefly, and washed it down with beer. “That's the way he put it, and he said he was the last descendent, so it was no big deal, just a formality, something his mother put in her will, something he asked me to do as his executor. I said yes, but I expected further briefing on the subject. And then--” he took another bite, chewed, and swallowed. “--all he said in his will regarding the land trust was that he expected me to observe his mother's wishes. He also left me the card of an attorney who worked for the bank who would fill me in on all the details--”

  “A guy named Miller?”

  “Roger that,” he said. “But they told me at the bank building that he was no longer with the bank, and they didn't know where he was--”

  “Who told you?”

  “The guy who manages the money for the land trust, Richard Polk. He said all he does is collect rent and pay taxes, and he doesn't know anything else.”

  “He told you a lie,” I said. “The man you were looking for is dead, but his son knows the details.”

  “And the whole time I was here, nobody in this town-- nobody at the gas station, nobody at the grocery store, nobody at the liquor store--, nobody would talk to me. Nobody knew anything about what land was Conley land. I asked around a little, and everyone said I should talk to Richard Polk at the bank.” He helped himself to a shot. “Nice,” he remarked to me, “At least you don't skimp on whiskey.”

  “You know,” the Sergeant-Major continued, “I don't give a damn who likes me in this world and who doesn't, as long as they don't fuck with me. My only real reason for coming to this little burg was that I also promised to inspect the family cemetery and make arrangements for its maintenance. After a day of getting nowhere, I finally had a woman in a restaurant give me directions to what she called the Conley plantation. All I found there was a stand of trees, but I did find the cemetery in the back. As I was driving back to my motel room that night, someone tried to run me off the road.”

  “No shit?” Steve had been lying back on his elbows on his bed, but he sat up.

  “No shit, soldier. There were two of them
in a tall green Chevy Suburban, and they tried running me into a deep ditch. It was sudden, and I was new in town-- and unarmed; you'll notice I didn't repeat that mistake-- and I didn't know what to think. I was in a rented Mercedes, so I evaded, and they never actually touched me. Hell, once I got away from them, I never saw them again. I filed a report with the sheriff, but he didn't seem too impressed with my story or particularly anxious to investigate it. I don't know... I guess I decided I didn't want to take on a whole county over a matter of lawn care. I came back to my room at this same motel, grabbed my bag, and drove back to the airport in Atlanta. Once I got home, I called the only remaining newspaper in Augusta and made arrangements to keep the ad running for three years.”