by WF Ranew
Wallace reluctantly agreed to take in Cleet and immediately regretted the decision.
That’s when his uneasiness started. He shook his head. Full commitment to Cleet Wrightman’s re-entry into society proved difficult for Wallace. Cleet always had been a burden on the man.
Still, he had to be prepared for the homecoming.
He promised his mother.
* * *
Cleet arrived in Damville at midnight. He walked straight to his cousin’s home and knocked on the kitchen door.
He and Wallace were never close, even when they were boys, and played cowboys and Indians in the backwoods. Cleet never won those imaginary fights. In the end, Wallace and his younger brother Gordon always piled on their mentally challenged cousin.
As he approached the house, Cleet glanced back into those woods. He remembered a lot of things that happened back there. Playing war games, marching off on fishing trips under the railroad trestle, and camping out around a fire.
After a few minutes and knocking several more times, the traveler heard footsteps approaching. Wallace eased open the door a bit, then brought it back to stare at Cleet in the back porch light.
“You made it, cuz,” Wallace said. “Guess you ought to come inside.”
Cleet sensed a cool reception and didn’t know what to make of it.
They walked into a room midway in the big house. The TV blared, and a cigar smoldered in an ashtray. The place was a mess, with old newspapers and magazines stacked here and there. In the corner, three shotguns rested against the wall. Family pictures hung in frames, many tilted and all caked with dust.
“You come right on down, did ya?” Wallace asked. He sat in the soiled easy chair next to the table and picked up the cigar. He took it between his lips and puffed, held the smoke, and blew it out.
A window air-conditioner coughed and strained to cool the room.
“Yeah, got out a few days ago and hitched my way here. Took ’bout as long as could be expected,” Cleet said.
Wallace nodded and looked at his visitor. Cigar smoke drifted up. The grayish cloud mingled with smoke on the ceiling.
“Reckon you’ll need to bunk som’ers, and I guess you can stay here a couple of days,” Wallace offered. “I imagine you’re likely hungry. I’ll put a can of beans to warm up.”
Cleet nodded.
He looked around the room as Wallace went back to the kitchen. He remembered everything about the house. But he’d never seen it in such disarray and so filthy. His grandmother would never have left it in such a condition.
In a few minutes, Wallace hollered for Cleet to come and eat.
As he rose and walked down the short hallway, Cleet heard boards creak. He felt the lingering heat from the afternoon.
The two men sat at the kitchen table. Wallace put down a plate and fork and set the hot pot of pork and beans on the tabletop. He put thick-cut smoked bacon onto a plate from an iron skillet on the stove and left it near Cleet.
“Help yourself,” he said. “I done ate.”
Cleet took the pot and forked out beans onto his plate, along with two pieces of bacon. Steam rose with a sweet aroma. Cleet tasted sorghum syrup and the bite of black pepper. The bacon was salty and good.
“Reckon you’re planning to be here a while, crazy boy?” Wallace asked.
Cleet looked up at his cousin as he chewed the beans. “I don’t know,” he said. “Supposed to check in with the mental health clinic in Thomasville. I ain’t got no way to get over there. Too far to walk. And hitching a ride’s out of the question. Done with that. Don’t you think I’m asking for one neither.”
Cleet finished the plate of beans and served up another helping.
“Let me give you some advice, Cleet,” Wallace said. “You can take it or leave it.”
Cleet looked up again at his cousin but said nothing. Wallace had aged a great deal, much more it appeared than Cleet had. Wallace had fattened up, although still broad in the shoulders and muscular.
“I’ll tell you straight up, for your own good,” Wallace offered. “People ’round here have a long span of memory. They ain’t forgot what happened that sent you off to the loony bin.”
“I didn’t do that,” Cleet said. His voice wavered and sounded unconvincing.
“Well, nobody in town ever believed otherwise. Best not go around thinking you’re the only person got locked up who ain’t guilty.”
Cleet cleared his throat and spoke again, with more determination. “I intend to get a job and a place to stay. I don’t know where. Just thought I’d come by and see you first. Guess folks hate me, but don’t matter. Nobody can put me through the hell of the hospital when I first got there.”
“That may be. Don’t know,” Wallace said. “But her family might come looking for you round here if they know you’re back. They still convinced you’re crazier than a shit house rat, Cleet.”
If the words burned, Cleet said nothing to indicate displeasure in hearing them.
Wallace spoke sternly. “Let me give you some advice. Take it or leave it, but I strongly urged you to take it.” His cousin’s voice stammered on a few words, but Wallace went on. His hands shook. “You need to move on to another town, Cleet. Ain’t no use denying you are not wanted around here. Not safe for you. Like it or not, crazy people sometimes scare others.”
Cleet paused before answering. The kitchen drew him out of the conversation and to the memories of years past. Thanksgiving in the big house, for one. The smell of sausage and ham for breakfast before the men went hunting. The warmth of the kitchen and the women talking. Turkey roasting, vegetables on the stove, and more biscuits in the making along with cornbread.
“I got an idea for you.”
Cleet listened.
Wallace laid it out. It required Cleet to travel to North Georgia, to Ellijay.
“It’s far enough away from here that nobody will know you,” Wallace said. “There’s work up there, I’m sure, in filling stations or janitorial. You’ll find something you can do and get paid for.”
“Why’d I want to go way up yonder?” Cleet asked.
“To save your ass from a lynch mob,” Wallace said.
That set Cleet back some. He had no idea people would want to kill him. Hell, I didn’t do it.
“Who in particular?”
“Who? What in hell, man? Who’d you think?” Wallace had raised his voice. “Jamison Elton, for one. He come by here carrying his shotgun the day they took you off. Thought he was going to shoot me.”
Silence from Cleet’s chair.
Wallace went on, telling Cleet about the aftermath of Mitsy Elton’s murder eighteen years before. The sheriff took Cleet to Central State Hospital, where he was incarcerated in the male prison building.
Back in Damville, the town mourned Mitsy.
Poor Mitsy.
* * *
The chaos of that day stuck with Cleet. How could it not? He went to her house to collect what she owed him on a Bible he sold her. He remembered well what happened the previous afternoon. It was his first time for him, the first glorious time with a girl.
As he approached Mitsy’s house to collect the debt the next day, he saw something that gave him pause.
Someone familiar to him walked up the front porch steps. He recalled going up the rickety planks. They were old and gave a good bit in a couple of places. The house’s white paint peeled badly all over the place.
Cleet turned and started for home. Then he thought he should go back and see what was happening.
The sheriff came to his house the next evening, handcuffed Cleet, and took him to the jail. He went to some kind of hearing. The judge asked him a bunch of questions. After that, he rode to Milledgeville.
Something bad happened to Mitsy that afternoon. Somebody killed her. A tragedy, but Cleet knew he didn’t do it.
He saw who killed her. Wasn’t himself. At least, he didn’t think so.
* * *
Cleet awakened at six the next morning a
fter arriving at his cousin’s. His neck ached, probably from sleeping with his head against the stiff arm of Wallace’s old couch in the living room. He heard someone in the kitchen and figured Wallace would be leaving to open up the shop by seven.
He sat up on the couch. Dust-crusted furniture and fixtures in this room, too. The window blinds, all pulled down, let in a little light in places where the slats had fallen out or went askew.
Wallace’s plan kind of made sense. All the time he was at Central State, Cleet dreamed of a day when he’d get out and travel far away and live. He imagined the place being in South America or an island in the Pacific Ocean. It never occurred to him that maybe he could just slip off up to another town in Georgia and call himself Joe Smith. Who would know him there? Who would care, as long as he wasn’t Cleet Wrightman, accused killer and former mental inmate?
Wallace left the house, and Cleet got up. He took a shower and dressed in a pair of Wallace’s dungarees and a shirt. The clothes hung loose. Wallace was the bigger man, and Cleet had fallen off in his years of incarceration. The shirt he could live with by tucking it into the pants, which held up on his waist OK when he pulled the belt to the last notch.
Cleet toasted bread under the stove’s broiler and found some butter and jelly in the refrigerator. He ate ten pieces of toast, most of Wallace’s loaf of light bread. He’d have to buy him another one.
Cleet took a walk downtown. He might even stop by Wallace’s shop. But in considering what his cousin told him, maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he shouldn’t go out at all.
He stuck to walking along the cracked, uneven sidewalks, rooted up by the huge oaks lining the street. It was the older part of town, where Wallace’s house was, near Cracker Town.
Cleet came to a familiar block. He walked to the right down a street filled with memories of his childhood. It also haunted him as the last safe place he’d known, his mother’s house. A home taken from him with the death of Mitsy Elton.
Maybe I ought to become a new person somewhere else.
* * *
As Cleet returned to Wallace’s house, he saw a man in a suit and white Panama hat sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair.
He looked like someone Cleet knew.
Cleet strolled up the front walk toward the steps and realized the man was another cousin, Gordon Adan, Wallace’s brother.
Gordon rose from the chair and smiled broadly.
“Cleet, my man,” he said and stepped down to greet his first cousin, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly twenty years.
“Hey there, Gordon,” Cleet said.
Midway on the front steps, the two men hugged awkwardly. Cleet felt as if he might fall backward, but Gordon held him and put an arm around his shoulders as they stepped up on the porch.
“Doggone it, Cleet, I’d recognize you anywhere,” he said. “And yet, it’s been so many years since you left town. I am so glad you are back in the bosom of your family. Praise the Lord!”
Cleet smiled but didn’t quite know what to say. Gordon had changed. He was a sullen teenager when Cleet left. He tended toward fits of anger at times. Then he got saved and became a different person, someone mature beyond his teenage years. Now, the grown Gordon was a man of the Lord, as Aunt Gladys had informed Cleet. Gordon was her youngest son.
Cleet invited him inside the house.
They sat down in the parlor.
“It’s good to see you, cuz,” Gordon said. He removed his straw hat and started to sit down in the big chair where his father read the Sunday paper.
A soiled, worn Antimacassar had slipped off and into the seat. Gordon removed the cloth with his thumb and forefinger's tips and let it drop on a nearby table.
He lowered himself into the chair without breaking his smile.
The room was hot with no air-conditioner. Cleet got up, raised the blinds, and turned on the window fan.
Cleet never remembered Gordon smiling so much. He did recall the cousin’s proclivity toward getting into trouble or causing pain to other kids and animals. Almost always, the situation had to do with the boy’s temper. It flared easily, and many times Cleet was the object of the wrath. Then Gordon changed when he was around thirteen. A religious man took him under his wing, straightened the litter shitter out, and made Gordon go to church.
Now they were seated, Cleet didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t much at conversation. He remembered his days selling Bibles. He could talk to people then because he knew what to tell them. Since Gordon was a natural talking these days, Cleet let him go with it.
“Cleet, I know your time away must have been hard,” the preacher said. “Your daddy dying when you were young and then your mother passing while you were up yonder in Milledgeville. Glad you’re back, though.”
Cleet nodded.
“But tell me, cousin,” Gordon continued. “Are you right with the Lord, son? Do you know God’s grace? He forgives us of our sins if we ask him. I know you must have a troubled heart, son, but I am here for you. I’m a man of God and have a little church out on the Moultrie highway. I wish you would join us for service Sunday.”
Cleet thought the idea absurd. He had no way to drive all the way out toward Moultrie to go to church. No car, and he sure wasn’t about to hitchhike again. He’d done plenty of that recently.
He just nodded.
“Good, I hope you can. Now cousin, let us pray together.” Gordon got up, walked over, and placed his hands on Cleet’s head. The preacher bowed his head and tightened his face. He squeezed his eyes shut and poured forth with words directly to the Almighty.
“Oh, dear Lord and our precious Savior,” he proclaimed. “Bring peace to the life of my kin here, Cleet Wrightman. He’s had mental issues since a child, but he’s got a good heart, Lord. I just know it. Please lift him from the hell he has known these last eighteen years. The years of mental torment and physical bleakness. Please touch him, Lord, and bring him peace. In the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
Cleet muttered, “Amen.”
“Cousin, I have to leave you, but call me if you need anything at all in the way of spiritual guidance.”
Cleet looked up to see Gordon’s card in his face. He took it and tried to read it all in one glance. He’d look at it later. Cleet slipped the card into his shirt pocket.
* * *
Wallace returned home that evening with an idea.
“I heard about a man, Cleet, over in Attapulgus,” Wallace said as soon as he walked in after work. It was a week or so since Cleet arrived in Damville. “He’s gone help us make you a new man.”
Wallace sat down in the front room, where Cleet was lying on the couch.
“We have to drive over there to do this, but he can fix you up with a new driver’s license, birth certificate, and even military discharge papers,” Wallace said.
Cleet pulled himself to sit on the couch and stared at Wallace.
“You don’t seem too excited, Cleet. Talk to me.”
“Well, Wallace, if you say so,” Cleet said. “I been thinking about a new me. It’s confusing, but I reckon it’s probably the best thing right now. As you said the other night.”
The next day after work, Wallace and Cleet drove to a farm outside Attapulgus. Wallace paid the man two hundred dollars for three documents. They’d be ready in a week, the man told them.
Chapter Fifteen
Two days after Wallace put Cleet on a bus to Atlanta then on to Ellijay, Georgia, the mechanic heard a knock on his front door. Actually, someone pounded on the door.
Wallace thought the glass might break. He went and opened the door.
Jamison Elton stood there and held a shotgun.
“Woah, now. What the hell, Jamie? Believe we been through this before,” Wallace raised his hands and stepped backward. He had shotguns in the middle room, where he lived most of the time. Another one was behind the front door, not three feet from where he stood. A twenty-gauge double gun, loaded.
Despite his jitters of late, Wallace k
ept his cool. He’d talked people down from rage before. He took in the odor Jamison emitted into the air between the two men. Stale whiskey. The sweaty kind of air from someone drinking a lot of hard liquor over several days.
Jamison said nothing.
“You want to come in, Jamie? ’Course, you going to have to leave that bird gun on the porch.”
The visitor looked around and leaned his gun by the door. He staggered into the house.
* * *
Someone followed Jamison to Wallace’s house that evening. The person came into the kitchen just as the two were talking at the front door.
* * *
Wallace showed no relief and led Jamison to the middle room. “Tell me what’s got your goat up so’s you’d come over here with a gun. I take it the thing’s loaded.”
Jamison sank into a chair by the television. Wallace’s two other shotguns were behind him.
“I hear tell around town that retard cousin of yours is back,” Jamison said. His voice wavered, but his tone was harsh. “Staying here.”
Wallace stood there a moment before easing himself back into his TV chair. He considered the question. One he expected, of course, but not a query he wanted to give any details in the answering.
“He was here, that is true. But Cleet’s moved on down the road,” Wallace said. “Down in Florida.”
“I want to know where. I’m going to kill that crazy bastard good and for all,” Jamison snorted. “Nothing you can say going to convince me otherwise.”
Wallace leaned forward in his chair. “Jamison, I know what happened to your family all those years ago still hurts,” Wallace said. “But Cleet’s done his time in that mental institution. Eighteen years of hell. Leave it be. Let it go. Get on with your life.”
Jamison spit on Wallace’s rug. Wallace watched as it bubbled there.
“I really don’t give a damn what you think, Wallace.”
“OK, then consider this. Mitsy’s gone, Jamie. She’s been dead nearly two decades. She was a pretty young woman, and I know it was a horrible loss her getting kilt that way. But she ain’t coming back.”
