by Lila Beckham
“Boy, don’t you know how to listen to instructions” Cook said as he wrenched the boys arms behind him and cuffed him.
The entire time all this had been going on, Leonard was trying to get to his feet and cussing Joshua for every sorry sons-a-bitch he could think of. When Joshua had finally had enough of Leonard’s filthy mouthed insults, he kicked Leonard’s good leg out from under him and sent Leonard crashing to the ground.
Joshua put a knee to Leonard’s back and cuffed him. “Do I need to gag you, too?” he asked when Leonard began to say something.
Leonard glared over his shoulder at him but remained quiet. He could tell that Joshua was done with being nice, and done he was; he had had it up to the gills with all of them. It was all he could do not to haul off and kick Leonard in the teeth!
“You boys showed up at the right time. How did you know?” he asked his deputies once he had Leonard under control.
“Mr. Kelly from across the swamp called and told Ida Mae that there was someone shooting back here at your cabin, she called us,” Cook replied.
“They probably parked at the old plantation and walked in,” Calvert suggested.
“Yeah, probably, that’s about the only place they could have parked to walk here, at least from this side of the river without coming down into my yard,” Joshua agreed. “Lock ‘em up for the time being, I’ll decide what to do with them later. You can get the vehicle impounded too. Maybe by the time they get through paying bail money and impound fees, they will think twice before stirring up a mess again.”
“I doubt it Sheriff, people like them don’t learn anything the easy way, they always have to learn their lessons the hard way,” Deputy Cook grumbled.
Joshua just grunted as he turned to walk up onto the porch. He knew Cook was right. That had been his experience too when dealing with people that had the same mindset as Leonard and little Tom. The other boys were probably of the same mindset being as they were kin and associated with Leonard.
Hook crossed Joshua’s mind; he was nothing like Tom, nothing like Willie either, but neither Willie nor Tom was like their father.
Their father, Bill Stringer, was as kind a soul as you would ever a wanted to meet. The boys must have inherited their mindset and ways from their mother’s side of the family. Joshua was not as familiar with her as he was the old man; now though, they were all gone - the old man, the boys, Willie and Tom. The only male figure the younger boys had now was Leonard-that was not good at all. If anybody was a ‘yellow belly,’ thought Joshua, it’d be Leonard.
Joshua sat down in his rocker and reached for his smokes. He needed a drink too, but he would wait until his deputies left to pour himself a glass of whiskey. After a few minutes, they left taking Leonard to jail and the boys to juvy. Deputy Cook was the only one lagging. Joshua knew he wanted something or had something to say was the reason he waited for the others to leave.
“If you got something to say to me, Cookie, spit it out. You know I don’t like anyone beating around the bush.”
“Yes, sir, I just wanted to make sure you was alright before I left. I know you was banged up pretty good from the wreck and then you was shot. Those things can catch up with you when-”
“When you get old,” Joshua grimaced.
“No sir, that wasn’t what I was going to say. I was going to say when you’re tired and not gettin’ enough rest. We’ve just been worried about you.”
“Y’all needn’t worry, son, I am fine. I get enough sleep to get by; you go on home and get you some. You will be a lot more help to me that way.”
“Yes, sir, I will see you in the morning.” Joshua watched Cook walk toward his patrol car and then watched the taillights as he drove out the driveway. As soon as he was out of sight, Joshua let out a sigh on relief and then poured a glass of whiskey.
He had seen Cook eyeing at the bottle. He had never hid his drinking, but normally he did not drink unless he was sitting at home. He had a right to do whatever he wanted when he was off duty, but since he was never actually off duty, he considered his time at home as his own. He stood and walked to the edge of the porch to take a piss. When he looked down, the possum was on the ground near a tree.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked, of course the possum only gazed at him and then climbed the tree. Before he sat down, he reached in and turned the kitchen light off. He had turned it on after the deputies got there so that he could see better on the back porch. The screen door creaked as he opened and closed it. He needed to oil it. He added the squeaking door to his list of ‘need to dos’ and lit a cigarette.
As he sat there thinking and listening to the sounds of the night, fog began to rise from the river; he shivered. The night air was not quite as warm as it had been the last few weeks. Several long swallows of whiskey warmed him right up. He leaned back, slid his behind forward in the rocker, and then propped his booted feet on the railing. Morning found him in the same position.
Joshua woke with a start. He had been having one of those same weird dreams he had been having ever since he had to kill the psychotic Dixon brothers and finding their trophy room of women’s heads. Each dream was different, but in many ways, they were the same. They always involved the heads sitting on the shelves.
In this dream, he was standing in the middle of the room looking from head to head, wondering which one of them was his mother. Suddenly, each head began trying to talk, but they could not speak because their lips were sewn shut. Joshua grabbed a pair of snips like the ones he had used to cut the thread from Emma’s lips when the Dixon brothers had her. He began snipping the thread and then pulling it from their lips. As he did, each spoke a phrase or verse of some sort. All but the last one… she did not look at him or attempt to speak. Most of the heads had at least a few springs of hair attached to them but he could not remember the color of his mother’s hair, her eyes either.
The eyeholes of the heads on the selves all had miniature tombstones stuck in them instead of dried up eyeballs. He knew the tombstones in the eyes came from lyrics in the Steppenwolf song - ‘the Pusherman.’
When he thought of his mother and tried to remember her face, all he could remember was her sitting on the couch, patting it, and motioning for him to sit beside her. All he saw were her hands as she folded them and laid them in her lap. He wondered why he could not remember his mother’s face.
He needed to go look through their belongings and find the family photos. Joshua had not gone through his father’s belongings after he passed away. His granddad had hired someone to pack up everything in the house and move it to storage.
Joshua lived with his grandparents until their deaths. After they passed, he bought his cabin, and then he paid someone to move his parent’s stuff from storage to his granddaddy’s place. He could have lived in his grandfather’s home as long as he wanted. His grandfather left the farm to him, but since he was married, he wanted him and Francine to have a place of their own, a fresh start. His grandfather had sold his father’s house and put the money in an account for Joshua. That was what he used to buy the cabin and land where he now lived.
“Dragging all this out to muddle through is not getting me anywhere,” he muttered and glanced toward the swing as he had always done when figuring things out. He would talk to his dog Jack as if he was a person and could actually understand what he was saying, but Jack was not there. He missed his dog and wished the Dixon brothers had not killed him when they grabbed Emma from his porch.
Joshua decided to concentrate on what the heads were saying to him; however, he could not remember exactly what they said either. He thought it odd that only the oldest heads on the shelves were in his dreams, those the boy’s father murdered thirty years earlier. The heads of the younger women the brothers killed were not there in his dream. He knew they were not there because each of them had cropped dyed black hair and Egyptian painted eyes. He wondered why the brothers dyed and cropped the women’s hair and decorated their eyes with black make-u
p.
He closed his eyes envisioning the heads on the shelves. The third or forth from the left had short dark sprigs of hair probably five to six inches long. Was she the boy’s mother? Did they cut and dye the young women’s hair to make them look the way their mother looked, and what about the decoration of the eyes? Joshua doubted the boy’s mother wore her makeup the way the made up the girls… maybe they cannot remember what their mother looked like either…
It was some weird ass shit and he doubted he would ever learn the truth. He stood, stretched, took a leak, and after a moment, went into the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. He pumped water from the pitcher pump mounted over the sink and then plugged in the coffee pot. The electric coffee pot was one of the few modern conveniences besides the refrigerator and washing machine he had invested in; it perked a pot of coffee in just a few minutes and he did not have to build a fire in the woodstove.
Thinking of the woodstove automatically caused him to think of Francine when they first got married. He chuckled as he remembered her trying to learn to cook on it; however, that had not lasted long. Francine was not cut out to be a pioneer wife, any sort of wife for that matter. Joshua did not regret marrying her, just trusting her; but she was dead and gone. He had never felt a need to replace her. He poured a cup of coffee and walked out onto the porch. The ringing of the phone brought him right back in; it was John Metcalf. He wanted to let Joshua know what he had learned from the crime scene.
“You been at it all night” Joshua asked.
“Yep, been processing the latent prints from the knife and comparing them to the ones they faxed in here a couple of days ago. They’re a match for the one that killed the others. I wish we had a better way of tracking, well, a faster way of tracking fingerprints from state to state. It would make my job a lot easier.”
“What would make all our jobs easier is if folks quit killing one another,” Stokes replied seriously.
“Oh yeah, that’d make it real easy, Sheriff, but that’s not going to happen. If anything, the crime rate just keeps climbing higher and higher.”
“Yeah, it does, John. Every year it seems to get worse. Did you learn anything else from the crime scene?”
“Yes, Sir, The coroner says that Mrs. Vice was molested. He took a swabbing to compare, said something about being able to test the blood type of the perpetrator. We want to do that because I found two different blood types in the kitchen area. We believe one to be the killers. In his rage of stabbing Mrs. Vice, he may have cut himself. Ola’s blood type was O positive; the other type I found was very rare - it is AB negative. Only 1% of the population has that blood type.”
“What about Jesse’s blood type? It could have been his blood in the kitchen.”
“No, sir, I checked that. Jesse was also O positive. Sheriff, if we catch this man I think it would be easy to convict him on that basis alone. AB negative is extremely rare.”
“That would be good; keep me informed, John. I have several people I am going to talk to about migrant workers, see if maybe he is still hanging around here. He might have decided to stay a while since this is a nursery and farm town. There are lots of jobs to do this time of year.”
“Yes, Sir, I will check back with you later.”
Joshua hung up the phone, refilled his cup, and then walked out onto the porch. He sat down and lit a smoke. The squirrels and birds were busy as bees gathering nuts, berries, and twigs for nests. It was still mating season. Joshua liked the spring season with its blooming flowers and the smell of fresh cut grass and hay. The wisteria vines that ran through the trees south of his cabin were beginning to bloom. He liked the scent they give off. Suddenly Joshua was a little boy again. He remembered carrying a cluster of them in his hand, petals dropping off them as he ran up the walkway to his house; however, that was all. The memory was gone before it was fully remembered.
He must have been taking the flowers to his mother…
Fall was Joshua’s favorite time of year. He loved the aroma of fall, wood smoke rising from chimneys, frosty mornings, and the smell of apple cider brewing when he walked into Miller’s Grocery. He finished his smoke, rinsed his cup and unplugged the coffee pot. He had slept in his clothes, but felt no need to change; he had showered just before putting them on the night before. He grabbed his hat, locked the door behind him and left. By 9 a.m., he was sitting in front of the office of Edgewood Nursery. The owner, Bill Thrower, was coming down the steps when Joshua got out of his cruiser.
“What can I help you with, Sheriff?”
“Nothing, Bill, I stopped by to talk to Kitty about Joe Dyas,” Joshua replied, saying the first thing that come to mind.
“It’s a shame what happened to Joe. He was a good worker and a good man.” Bill said. “I thought y’all got the fella that killed him… it was Tom Stringer wasn’t it. At least that was what I heard. I hear you had to kill him when you tried to arrest him for it.”
“Yes, I did,” was all Joshua said. He did not feel like discussing it.
“Well, I’m glad he didn’t get away with it. Tom always was an arrogant sort.”
“Yeah, he was, and I hate Joe got caught up in it. We’ve been taking up a collection for his widow and young’uns. I thought maybe Kitty could help with the distribution of it and make sure it got into the widows hands.”
“She’s in there, Sheriff, just go on in,” Bill replied getting into his pickup.
6
Nit and Pea Picking
Joshua took the steps two at a time and tapped on the door before opening it. Kitty Christian was sitting at a desk that faced the door. She looked up and smiled. Kitty was a pretty woman and Joshua like her temperament and personality. If she was not married to one of his deputies, he might go after her himself. She was one of those natural dark beauties. From what he had heard, her grandma was a full-blooded Cherokee. He would not doubt it either; you could see the Indian in her, her kinfolk too.
“What can I do you for, Sheriff,” Kitty asked cheerfully.
“Well, Hon, I wanted to talk to you about migrant workers, like the Mexicans that come in here every year; the hiring practices and so forth. I was wondering if you knew which nurseries hired them and so on.”
“I can tell you for sure that Bill Thrower doesn’t hire any Mexicans, Sheriff. He will hire migrant workers during potting and trucking season, but only white or coloreds. He refuses to use Mexicans even though several other owners have told him that they’ll work harder and cheaper than the others will.”
“Is that right”
“His exact words are - ‘whites and niggers belong here, Mexicans don’t; they belong in Mexico.’ He says they come here to work and then don’t want to leave. When they start renting houses out here where the work is, because most don’t have vehicles, they’ll pile ten to twelve to a house. They hang out in front of local businesses watching our womenfolk then the next thing you know, you got little Mex-Aricans running all over the place; they damn sure won’t leave then. Bill says it makes everything of value go down, real estate, quality of life, everything. Those are his exact words, Sheriff. He gets angry just talking about them.
Now, I do know of several owners that truck them in and rail them in for ‘certain’ seasons; but there are many nurseries, like Pages, that work them year round. They set up housing, if you can call it that, for them. After they started using Mexicans to work their nurseries and farms, they won’t even hire whites or niggers except if they need bosses to show the Mexicans what to do and stay on them out in the fields. They drive those Mexicans the way they did the slaves back in the 1800s.”
“Do you know which nurseries besides Pages use them regularly?”
“It’s not just nurseries, Sheriff. Many of the farmers use them on a continual basis too. W. C. Vice is one of them. You know he plants hundreds of acres in vegetables and watermelons. He told Daryl Powell that he could not keep white or Negro workers in his fields. He says they’re too damn lazy. He said that most don’t last a f
ull day in an okra patch. Boney Maples says the same thing; he can’t keep local workers either. Boney and W. C. are two of the biggest producers around here besides Bohannon’s and Tanner.”
“That gives me a few leads to run down. Enough to keep me and my deputies busy for a while.”
“Are y’all still looking for the Mexican that murdered Jesse and Ola? Jim told me about it last night. He said it was bad; bad enough to ‘gag a maggot’ was his exact words. I haven’t said anything about it to anyone.”
“They had been dead a couple of days,” Joshua replied, but did not care much for his deputy’s description of the crime scene. It was somewhat callous to his way of thinking to describe it as so. “We don’t want that out any more than necessary.”
“Mum’s the word” Kitty winked. Joshua thanked her for her help then left. He drove straight to W. C. Vices to talk with him. When he got there, W. C. was driving a tractor away from his produce barn, pulling a trailer load of workers. He hollered and told Joshua that he would be right back; he was just taking them to the pea patch.
Joshua got out and lit a smoke then walked over to the produce barn. Several women, black, white, and Hispanic sat shelling peas into large bowls in their laps.
“Morning, Ladies” Joshua nodded.
“Morning, Sheriff” several replied. Joshua recognized one of the women; she was Faye Pack. He was well acquainted with her father Carlos. Carlos had a passel of young’uns; at least a dozen. As soon as they became teenagers, he put them to work. Their income paid the brunt of the bills and fed them. Although he probably could have received help from the state to feed his large brood, Carlos did not believe in welfare. He had told Joshua that he was raised in a family where they didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, but everyone worked or they did not eat; that was how he intended to raise his children. He said he did not want them to be a bunch of freeloaders like most of his kinfolk on the reservation were these days. The Creek Indian reservation where he was reared was about sixty miles north of Mobile.
