Zion

by Dayne Sherman

  Livestock was a major stake in the Hardin family’s livelihood, and the money earned through the stock meant that Sara could stay at home and not work outside the home. But now Tom was bracing for economic hardship, including more work laboring as a carpenter and general roustabout at the brickyard over on Highway 190 to make ends meet, more overtime if the foreman would grant him the extra hours.

  Most people in Zion and southwest Baxter Parish, as well as southeast Louisburg Parish were of Scotch-Irish extraction. The exceptions were small enclaves of French and Germans in Milltown, the Hungarians in Kilgore, the Sicilians up in Liberty City, and the sections of blacks scattered across the region in their settlements. But these were all minority populations. The Scotch-Irish residents were predominantly Protestant, typically Baptists or Methodists, and their frontier religion was keenly anti-intellectual and clannish, often bigoted, and fearful of those outside their kith and kin.

  Tom, however, saw little truth in the common notions of white supremacy or other obsessions taken up by the racists in the newly formed White Citizens’ Council in Pickleyville. He had been influenced early in his life by Methodism’s key doctrines of sanctification and Christian perfection, the teachings of John Wesley from the 1700s. Tom worked hard to live an upright and pious life, and he spent no time looking down on other races of people. Yet he, too, could be cautious around outsiders and somewhat distrustful. This was practiced in general and not necessarily along racial lines. The pine tree war was causing him more than casual concern, especially after being accused of arson by the marshal, and there were times when he was somewhat paranoid about the conflict in his community.

  But Tom was a different sort of man because he was one of Pickleyville Public Library’s best patrons. He had been the salutatorian of Milltown High in 1941. As a boy, he’d read the works of Zane Grey and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as The Iliad and The Odyssey. In recent years, he’d read Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird twice. Each week, he would pick up a few books from the library and read them during the late evenings when he wasn’t hunting or doing small carpentry projects. Tom planned to vote for Lyndon Johnson on November 3rd when many of his neighbors were voting for Barry Goldwater, most casting a Republican ballot for the first time in their lives.

  Over the years, men had made snide comments about Tom’s peculiar ways, his reading habits, and his weekly forays into the public library collection. Some called him “Little Einstein” behind his back because of his regular library patronage, but he never worried much about what people thought.

  Sara also read widely and regularly. Wesley, too, was an early and voracious reader. In the years prior to meeting Tom, Sara had studied at Newcomb College, the women’s college at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she earned a liberal arts degree. Tom had met her soon after she’d started working as a clerk at the public library in downtown Pickleyville following her graduation from Newcomb.

  When World War II ended, Tom studied at the junior college in Pickleyville, enduring several part-time semesters on the GI Bill of Rights, and he considered becoming a history teacher. However, the parish public schools were run by a semi-literate mob of fraternity boys, Delta Tau Deltas and Kappa Alphas, local men he did not care for, the likes of which also ran the timber companies. The idea of teaching school for these stooges gave him pause about furthering his formal education.

  Dealing with naturally corrupt folks discouraged him, so he left the college without earning a two-year degree. Instead of becoming a high school history teacher, he lived as a subsistence farmer on a patch of family land and raised hogs and cattle in the open range, working jobs locally—at the brickyard, over at the creosote plant for a time, and at the bag factory during different periods. For several years, he milked cows at a friend’s dairy until the farm finally went under. Sometimes he remodeled houses and undertook small carpentry jobs for neighbors, but the earnings were paltry at best. Tom was the peculiar embodiment of a man with a strong work ethic but very little ambition. He believed that the parable in Luke chapter 12 cautioned the faithful against building bigger and bigger barns. He worked hard but never had dreams beyond Zion.

  Tom harbored few regrets until recently when he was forced to begin removing his cattle and hogs from the land. People believed Fitz-Blackwell had paid bribes to pass the ordinance that banned the livestock from the woods, the unfenced open range owned by big landholders and timber companies throughout Baxter Parish, and this corruption made the loss of range rights all the more grievous. The stock ban was not what enraged Tom the most. It was the utter waste of killing the oaks and other hardwoods, poisoning them with dimethylamine salt and other chemical herbicides. Some large trees were killed by ringing them through the bark with a gas-powered “beaver machine.” The timber companies would employ any means necessary to kill hardwood trees, even cutting them down with chainsaws just so they’d die in the forest and make room for young pines. To Tom’s way of thinking, killing a hundred-year-old live oak tree and letting it rot in the forest was a form of fratricide and poor stewardship of God’s resources, a testament to man’s greed.

  A few days after the marshal’s visit, Tom drove to the feed store in Milltown to buy a sack of grain for his horse. It was half past four o’clock, and he was dog-tired from stacking green bricks most of the day in the kiln when he wasn’t driving the Gravely tractor that pulled the brick cart on a narrow railroad track through the place. The Gravely and cart hauled bricks to and from the kiln, and then Tom and a black laborer stacked pallets of fired bricks onto larger pallets that were loaded by a diesel forklift.

  Beam’s Feed and Farm fronted the railroad tracks on Main Street. Tom parked down from the store entrance. As he got out of his Ford pickup truck, he heard a catcall. Tom saw Sloan Parnell, a well-connected timber company hack, sitting on the tailgate of a brand new International Scout, a red four-wheel drive vehicle with a white top and a short box for a bed. He was smoking a little cigar, talking to a tall black-haired woman with a blouse that showed plenty of cleavage. Tom recognized her as Charity LeBlanc, a local preacher’s daughter, nothing more than a child in a woman’s body. She often ran with upper crust men.

  He looked at Sloan and made eye contact with him. He headed toward the store entrance, offering no gesture of friendship or acknowledgement. Several months earlier, while making his rounds checking on his hogs not far from Parnell family land, Tom almost had to draw his rifle on Sloan after he made a verbal threat, claiming he had a loaded pistol in his truck and calling Tom a criminal trespasser. He still wondered how he had avoided bloodshed, but Sloan finally backed off before he had to pull out the Savage deer rifle from the saddle scabbard.

  Tom’s father was a pious Methodist layman, but his father’s two brothers were lapsed, backslid and wayward, often bad to drink. Some nights during Tom’s childhood in the 1930s, his two uncles would come to the house in Zion and want to fight his father, and he would have to oblige them to protect the family. Occasionally, his father got bloodied fighting the pair of drunkards, and they’d come back the next day when they were sober with a new shirt or other items to replace what they’d destroyed the night before. As a result, Tom never drank, not even while in the navy, and he was always one to avoid violence whenever he could despite the region’s notoriety for hotheadedness and blood feuds.

  “I’m a Fitz-Blackwell man now,” Sloan hollered to Tom. He stood up from the tailgate and made a flanking jog toward the feed store entryway.

  Tom knew he’d have to pass Sloan to buy the sack of grain. “Is that so?” he said and kept walking.

  “Damn straight it is, and I’ve got a thousand-dollar reward out on the arsonist that burned the pines over on Rogers Road, you silly son of a bitch,” Sloan said, closing in.

  “Great. Maybe I ought to go claim it by bringing you in,” Tom said. He took a quick glance at the man as he approached, but he kept walking.

  Tom had not set fire to the patch of woods, not the patch on Rogers
Road, not any forest at all. There were dozens of men who hated Fitz-Blackwell, hated the killing of the oaks. They despised the removal of the livestock and the end of open range in the Zion community and elsewhere. Almost any man in the rural area could be guilty. He understood Sloan had no evidence against him. He was free of guilt, but he often wondered what good this was in such a crooked and fallen world.

  When Tom placed his hand on the brass doorknob, he felt a shove to his shoulder, then a second push to his back almost simultaneously. He was nearly knocked off balance, his chest hitting the door, but he was able to spin around, and Sloan was the perfect distance from Tom’s right fist. He hit the man square in the nose with a solid blow, one sure and effective punch to the face, which made his nose butterfly into a crimson spectacle of smashed flesh.

  “Don’t put your hands nowhere on me,” Tom said.

  Sloan was stunned. He was as large as Marshal Brownlow, even a little taller, and stouter. Now he was holding his nose with his hat knocked off his head. He started backing up, crawfishing like a coward down the sidewalk.

  Tom pursued him with his fists in front of his chest like a welterweight boxer. He slammed him with a right jab to the torso and then a left fist to the temple. Sloan went down, his knees buckling, and he looked to the sky as if watching a long line of shooting stars in the broad daylight.

  So Tom stood his ground and saw Sloan pull to his knees and spit out a line of bloody phlegm. He watched the man almost a minute, trying to ascertain if there was any fight left in him. Sloan started staggering back to his Scout.

  Thinking the threat was over, Tom went inside the store.

  “Howdy, Hardin,” Jack Beam said.

  “I’d like a hundred pound sack of heavy grain,” Tom said to the storekeeper. The place smelled of mothballs and fertilizer. His hands trembled.

  Beam stood behind the counter. He wore a striped railroad engineer’s cap, overalls, and a starched long sleeve shirt. “All right,” he said, writing on a gray receipt pad. “You been doing okay, Hardin? I say, you look a bit flustered.”

  “I was fine until recently.”

  “Yeah. Why’s that?”

  “I had to knock the fire out of Sloan Parnell on your front steps.”

  “No kidding? I saw Parnell and some half-dressed girl out yonder earlier.” Beam looked up from his receipt pad.

  “I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with him,” Tom said.

  “He’s got that bad Parnell blood in him is all. They’re rich and inbred as a coop of speckled chickens. All of ’em is so damned scared somebody outside the family might steal their money. He’s just like his old daddy, P.T. ‘The Drunk’ Parnell, a trifling cur of a man, if you were to solicit my honest opinion. I hate like hell to see a Parnell come in here on account they’re always trying to beat me out of something I’ve got.”

  “Well, that’s according to their nature.”

  “That’s the Lord’s own truth. You think you’re going to have trouble with him when you go back to your truck?” Beam asked. He turned around and picked up a worn Fox double barrel shotgun from where it was leaned against the wall. He popped open the breech and checked the two sixteen gauge shells, the brass showing.

  “I don’t think I’ll have any trouble. He’s probably long gone by now. I rattled him pretty good. Might have broken his nose.”

  “I’d be pleased to run him off or call the law or something, but the law won’t do nothing.”

  “No, not much around here.”

  He leaned the shotgun against the wall again. “It’ll come to two and a quarter.”

  Tom paid him in cash.

  Beam called his helper. “Go get Mr. Hardin a sack of heavy grain and load it on his truck.”

  When the feed store man carried the sack to Tom’s truck a minute later, there was no sign of Sloan Parnell and his International Scout or the LeBlanc woman.

  Tom stood on the street looking around. Cars passed. A Mercury honked, and the driver waved. Staring down the street, Tom wondered how he’d found himself in such a strange period in parish history.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tom tried to avoid trouble. He stayed away from Milltown for a few days. He wanted to keep the peace, but the pines kept burning in and around Zion. Among the locals, there were debates about how far the fires were heading, whether or not the killing of the pines was escalating to an outright war and if the casual blows would turn deadly. Tom began to worry about it himself, not knowing if he would face a risk greater than a tussle with a spoiled rich man.

  He never went into the woods unarmed out of general fear, and he worked with his neighbor, James Luke Cate, as they attempted to catch the rest of their missing hogs and cows. James Luke was the husband of Tom’s first cousin once removed, Nelda, and he was Tom’s primary hunting partner. James Luke was originally from Slaughter, Louisiana, a dying little hamlet north of Baton Rouge. He and Nelda lived a mile south of the Hardins on Lower Louth Road. For all practical purposes, he was Tom’s best friend.

  James Luke swore to Tom that he wanted blood vengeance against the Parnells and the men killing the hardwoods and banning the livestock. He had a number of hogs and cows in the woods himself, and he was dead set against giving them away at the auction. Tom also knew that James Luke constantly passed along the rumor that Fitz-Blackwell had bought off the Louisiana Wildlife Commission, and he claimed this was the reason they’d sent game wardens to hassle the hunters and farmers. He told Tom that he’d placed Sloan Parnell in the crosshairs of the telescopic sight on his deer rifle one day, and he regretted not shooting him in the woods. Tom downplayed the declaration, thinking that perhaps James Luke was just talking trash after too much beer one evening.

  But Tom wasn’t an outlaw, and the harassment by the authorities was only a mild inconvenience. Until recently, he had never even seen a game warden north of the landing at Lizard Bayou. Now, however, the pine forests of Zion, Kilgore, Milltown, Packwood Corners, and Watermelon were teeming with wardens from all over the state. It reminded him of the FBI during the summer when they searched for the three missing civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. It seemed like there were authorities behind every bush.

  Financially, the parish stock law served a hard blow to Tom and the other small farmers. Because Tom owned a mere twenty acres, more than half of which was thick forest, he couldn’t graze two dozen cows and one hundred head of hogs on such a small tract. The new ordinance showed that the open range farmers were no match for the money doled out under the table by a multinational timber company. And everyone knew that Louisiana police jurors, the governing council for the parish, weren’t champions of virtue. They usually followed whatever pot was sweetest. The number of farmers was already diminishing. Men were leaving the woods and farms to work in the oil industry along the Mississippi River. But the stock law was the death knell, Tom thought, the end of local men being sustained from the land.

  He knew things were off kilter. It seemed to be getting harder and harder to make ends meet. His father had homesteaded the land and rarely held down a public job outside of the farm and forest, except for taking intermittent odd jobs as a carpenter. Now Tom needed to hold down a full-time job, as well as working the little farm and livestock operation. He believed the day might come when his own son would have to work two jobs off the home place, and his wife would need to leave the house for public work. Afterwards, ends still wouldn’t meet, and he couldn’t imagine what might happen to his grandchildren in this economic paradise.

  Tom decided to do the only thing he knew to do: try to catch the animals and take them to the auction in Ruthberry. Selling them to the highest bidder in a flooded livestock market would barely cover his expenses. Tom was more than a little tempted to leave the hogs in the woods.

  It bothered him to know that Sloan was in line to be named to the plant superintendent post at Fitz-Blackwell’s big lumber mill in the center of neighboring Louisburg Parish. A plant manager was a white hat
job, one where he’d dress in a coat and tie for work, a position of power and privilege in the region. Sloan was nothing more than a political appointee for the mill, a man with adequate connections to make things go smoothly in the parish.

  After Brownlow’s visit and the latest altercation with Sloan, Tom grew angrier by the day. To be accused of setting fires by the marshal was an affront to his integrity. In a manner of speaking, it was a slap in the face, an insult that was a violation of goodwill between local men. There was a certain amount of dignity afforded by years of relations and established character, and this had been thrown by the wayside.

  One morning while eating his wife’s cooking, a fried egg and some grits, Tom listened to the Swap-n-Shopper on the radio. The caller said that he was selling his cattle and would take almost any offer for them, no price beyond consideration. He recognized the cracking voice and the phone number. It was Mr. Leo Mullins, an elderly World War I veteran whose cattle were his livelihood. The ungodly thieves, Tom thought. If they treat us like a bunch of criminals, maybe we should start acting like criminals. At the table, he stiffened and pushed the half-eaten plate away from his chest.

  Earlier in the week Tom had driven over to the old Weathersby farm to see if some of the hogs a neighbor had penned up were some of his stock. It was nearing dusk when he left, and he drove through a patch of land owned by Fitz-Blackwell. Smoldering fires burned on both sides of the road, smoke everywhere like a bad haze. He came to a checkpoint where two game wardens and a state forestry investigator stood, and they made him get out of his truck. They searched the inside, under the seat, behind the seat, in the glove box and the bed for anything connected to arson. They found nothing but held him up for twenty minutes asking him questions. The lack of respect enraged Tom. By the time they were done, it was too dark to deal with the penned hogs, and he had to turn around and go back home.