Zion

by Dayne Sherman

  So he began to entertain ways to get even with the timber companies. And though James Luke had never come out and said he was one of the arsonists, Tom figured he’d done some of the burning in the woods. His whereabouts were often questionable, and Tom suspected that James Luke was seeing a woman at the state highway barn where he worked as a safety supervisor. Perhaps he was both burning pines and running around on Nelda. Tom couldn’t say for sure.

  Sara walked into the room and asked, “Tom, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” he said, leaving the kitchen table for the barn. If he’d been inclined to drink like his long passed away uncles, he would have gotten a bottle of whiskey, and if he’d been a violent man, he would have done more than just contemplate ways to seek revenge.

  James Luke had asked Tom to go raccoon hunting later that evening. At dark, Tom saddled old Sam, slipping his Winchester .22 magnum rifle into his large leather scabbard, which swallowed the small rifle. The horse stood tied to one of the posts on the front porch of the house, both of his eyes closed and one back hoof propped up to rest.

  Tom sat in the kitchen doing the crossword puzzle in Friday’s States-Item newspaper. He listened to the radio playing The North Carolina Ramblers, Uncle Dave Macon, Jimmie Rodgers, and The Stanley Brothers. The station played Earl Scruggs and his “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” one of Tom’s favorites. It grew later and later as he waited for James Luke to arrive on horseback to go hunting. Sara and Wesley had gone to bed, and after he’d finished the puzzle, he sat reading a history book and listening to old-time music for what seemed like the longest time.

  Finally, James Luke knocked on the back door.

  Tom could see him in the window as he stood on the steps. He opened the door.

  His buddy was dressed in his work clothes. “Let’s go find us a coon,” James Luke said.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” Tom said. “I was about to unsaddle Sam. I’ve been a little concerned about you, and I almost called your house, but I was afraid I’d wake up Nelda. What happened?”

  “I had some things to do tonight, a few errands to run.”

  Tom looked into the darkness. “It sure is smoky out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t suspect I ought to ask.” Tom shrugged his shoulders.

  “Don’t. Let’s go turn the hounds loose a little ways to the east of Boss Gibson’s place, and we’ll make it a short hunt if we can.”

  “Good. That’ll work.”

  Out in the yard, Tom and James Luke climbed on their horses. Tom rode Sam, and James Luke straddled Diablo. The two men hunted in the woods north of Tom’s house for a while. James Luke’s black and tan coonhounds treed once, and Tom shot a big sow raccoon out of the top of a gum tree. Then the two men called it a night, heading home.

  Back at Tom’s barn, they skinned the animal, James Luke saving the hide to sell. Tom said he’d put the carcass in his freezer, one foot left attached to prove that it wasn’t a common housecat. He planned to offer it to the Widow Ruby Lazarus who lived just down the road. She was an elderly woman without any pension who survived on the charity of neighbors and family members. She had a great love for any wild game folks brought her, and she’d trade preserves or pies for raccoons. In the late winter, Tom would bring her half of a hog to help her sustain herself through the winter months. That is, if he had any hogs left on the place.

  It was a quarter to one. After turning his horse out to pasture, Tom went inside to go to bed. James Luke returned home on horseback, riding in the darkness, his two hounds trailing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On Saturday morning, Tom, Wesley, and James Luke rode the horses through the Big Natalbany River swamp with six dogs, five of them baying curs. James Luke rode with a bullwhip in his hand, which he would pop occasionally, making the sharp sound of a rifle as the cotton popper at the end of the leather plait broke the sound barrier. Wesley rode one of James Luke’s horses, a thinly built Welsh pony not quite as large as a mature horse. The boy weighed eighty-five pounds and the horse fit him well. In fact, he was the only person who ever rode the little horse. James Luke had offered to let Wesley have the horse as a Christmas present the year before, but Tom declined, not wanting to accept such an expensive gift from James Luke.

  The curs were loose, but Jubal trailed Tom’s horse tethered to a rope. Tom usually kept him on a rope leash because he would catch animals at inopportune times, sometimes the wrong animal, perhaps even a human, friend or foe. Tom was thankful that it was dry out, because otherwise the horses were apt to bog down in the muddy flats that followed alongside the river.

  They’d caught a half-dozen hogs where they foraged in some bait corn on the ground near a livestock pen in the woods, the swine now loaded into a pipe stock trailer hitched to the bumper of Tom’s truck. The pigs’ ears were already notched with Tom’s mark, a flat tip cut off of the right ear and three notches on the left.

  “At this rate, hell will stop taking sinners by the time we catch all our damned hogs,” James Luke said. He inspected the pigs in the back of the stock trailer, his hands gripping the pipe walls.

  “Yeah, it doesn’t look real promising,” Tom said, scraping a briar from a boot heel with a stick.

  “The hogs are getting real wary of the sound of a pickup truck,” James Luke said.

  “They hear us and start running the other way. I guess we’ll need to get the jump on them somehow or another, start doing more than just baiting and chasing them with the dogs. Maybe set up some kind of trapdoor pens or something.” Tom slapped the side of the trailer and a hog squealed as if hit by an electric jolt. “I just don’t know. There are so many folks in the woods gathering hogs that they’re really stirred-up. Wouldn’t it be something if we missed the deadline and ended up in jail for trespassing on posted land?”

  James Luke shook his head, lit an unfiltered Camel with a white-tipped kitchen match. “That’ll be the end of it all. If they don’t like the fire in the woods now, somebody’s house’ll get torched. They keep pushing me, and somebody pays in blood.”

  “At least we have these few to carry to the sale. That’s enough for today,” Tom said.

  Wesley walked over to them. “Pops, you care if I load the horses into the trailer?” he asked.

  “No, but don’t let the red hog out. Push him into the front compartment with a stick and latch the gate,” Tom said. “If you need help, holler.”

  There was a good-sized red boar locked up alone in James Luke’s stock trailer. The trailer was hooked to the back of his 1958 Chevrolet pickup.

  Tom and James Luke stood beside the trailer attached to Tom’s truck. They were talking, trying to figure out how to catch the remaining hogs, and how Tom was going to make a living once the hogs were out of the woods and sold. The dogs were tied in the bed of Tom’s truck that was parked in the shade of a live oak tree where the men stood.

  A few minutes later, Wesley screamed. When Tom turned and looked toward the bumper-hitch trailer, he could see that Wesley had a two hundred pound boar by a leg and it was dragging him out of the trailer, pulling him like a mad bull.

  “Damn it,” James Luke hollered.

  But the hog had not gotten away. Instead, it turned on Wesley, knocking him down, making a skillful attack. The hog had no tusks, but his jaws were razor sharp and as hard as cast iron.

  In the seconds before the men ran over to help him, Tom had the presence of mind to release his hog dog from the bed of his truck, the place where he was tethered to a rope leash. “Get ’em, Jubal. Catch ’em,” Tom yelled.

  The dog made a beeline toward the boy in the back of the open trailer, never barking. Jubal passed James Luke who was already running. In a flying leap, the Catahoula bulldog lunged into the back of the trailer as silent as a sniper, and it appeared at first that he was mauling Wesley. As fast as the strike of a poisonous snake, the dog grabbed the boar by the ear in a snarling jump. The red hog began to squeal like he was being skinned alive, and he shook
the dog that was locked on his ear. Jubal was thrown from side to side, and both the dog and hog fell out of the back of the trailer and onto the ground, but the dog never let go.

  James Luke picked the boy up by the arms while Jubal stayed clamped to the wayward pig, the squeals ear-piercing. The two men checked on Wesley. His clothes were covered with rank hog and cattle feces. “Son, you all right?” James Luke asked.

  “I think so, Uncle Jimmy,” said the boy.

  Tom tried to brush off Wesley’s shirt and could see that he was scraped but otherwise in good shape.

  Then James Luke fought to hobble the hog’s legs with leather straps while the dog kept his teeth locked onto a bloody ear, the animal squealing even more, but unable to get away. Once the men got the animal’s legs secured, Tom called the dog off and snapped a rope leash to Jubal’s collar, praising him for the faithful work, rubbing his ears and head.

  “Can I kick the hog?” Wesley said, as he stared at the tied up boar on the ground, his legs in fetters.

  “I think you’d better not,” Tom said.

  “Just once, Pops?”

  “Not even once.”

  The immobile boar was laid out like a sack of feed in the compartment in the front of James Luke’s steel stock trailer. They loaded the horses into the trailer behind where the hog lay bound.

  Jubal rode in the back of Tom’s truck with the other curs, all of them fastened on lines near the cab so they wouldn’t fight each other.

  After pulling out a fresh shirt from behind the truck seat and giving it to Wesley, Tom let the boy drive his truck. Tom rode beside him. Wesley sat atop a two by twelve pine board and a worn copy of the 1960 Sears and Roebuck catalog. Tom cautioned him to drive slowly on the gravel road, being careful not to jostle the pigs, which squealed as the truck traveled the rutted roadway.

  “Am I driving okay, Pops?” Wesley asked, a smile on his face that seemed as wide as the windshield.

  “You’re doing fine, son,” Tom said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was almost winter, cool during the day and downright chilly at night. Tom kept working forty-hour weeks at the brickyard, and on top of this, he tried to catch and sell as many hogs and cattle as possible. Now and then, a local farmer would pen some of Tom’s stock, and he’d go pick up the cows or hogs, and thank his neighbor, remembering the goodwill and mutual help for the future.

  The forest fires weren’t slowing. New fires were being set most nights. Tom realized there wasn’t much he could do about the changing times, and he was without hope that the politicians would stop the ordinance ending open range. He had not seen Sloan Parnell since the fight at the feed store, and he only saw Marshal Brownlow at church on Sundays. When he did see the marshal, relations were cordial.

  On Monday afternoon, November 9th, Corrine Travis, Tom’s closest cousin, came over to the Hardin home to pick up some fresh yard eggs from the family’s chicken coop and saw the front door ajar. Jubal was loose, a short piece of broken chain dangling from his thick neck. Tom’s truck was parked beside the house in its normal spot. Tom had caught a ride to work with a neighbor so that Sara would have transportation to go to the grocery and run some errands. Corrine beat on the doorjamb and then called out, but no one answered. Fearful that something was wrong, she went into the house and looked in the rooms. The interior doors were open. Corrine found Sara in the bedroom. At first, she thought the woman was dead, but she found a faint pulse at her wrist, showing life left in the battered body.

  While Tom was working at the brickyard and Wesley was at the school in Milltown, Sara had been attacked. She was raped, beaten unconscious, naked and tied to an iron bed with stiff ropes.

  There was no sign of a break-in, but the doors of the house were never locked anyway. The only signs of trouble were the dog’s broken chain and Sara’s crippled body.

  Marshal Brownlow found Tom at work. He was sitting atop the little Gravely tractor, pulling a cart of green bricks, hauling them to the kiln, a thirty-foot tall dome-shaped oven heated by coal.

  Tom looked up from his tractor and saw the marshal and his foreman walking toward him. The foreman waved a hand and Tom shut the tractor engine. He sensed death in the air. Hours later, he could still recall the peculiar smell. Something was stuck in his nose as he stood up from the tractor seat.

  Brownlow said, “We need you to come with us to the office. Something’s happened to Sara, and we need to talk to you about it right now.”

  “What happened, Donald? What in the hell happened?” Tom asked. “Did she get into a wreck or something?”

  “It would be better if we talked at the office. Let’s go over yonder,” the marshal said, motioning for Tom to follow.

  As they walked quickly toward the building where the business was run, Tom asked, “What’s going on? Is she alive?”

  “Barely,” the marshal said.

  Once inside the foreman’s office, which was nothing more than a glorified shack, the marshal told him what had happened. He described the bedroom scene as Corrine had found it.

  Tom cried out in anger, pounding his right fist in his left palm. The marshal drove him over to the hospital in his patrol car, and Tom fought back tears the whole way. How did his well-ordered life and family fall into such a tragedy? He wondered what they’d done to bring on such a curse as he prayed for his wife.

  The Pickleyville hospital room was humid, almost water-damp. When Tom saw his wife, she was not dead but narrowly hanging on to life. Her face was drawn to one side as if stricken by a palsy. Sara was in a semi-coma, but she wasn’t placid or still. Instead, she was restless, appearing as though she was being assaulted in her sleep, often wide-eyed but focusing on nothing, constantly kicking off her sheets. She had to be restrained with leather straps at the wrists and feet.

  She was blinded by the darkness of her own mind, a war taking place in her soul that manifested itself in the current struggles. And the doctor had little conclusive information to tell the family, a prognosis as mysterious as the attack.

  Tom sat at her bedside for a few moments before the nurses made him leave. In the hallway outside of the ward, he offered his simple prayers, the same petitions of men through all time, the prayers of anyone traveling a dark wood, those who faced senseless damage and gratuitous evil. He tried to make sense of his broken world but the heavens were brass, and nothing came back from his petitions but the echo of his own voice.

  Sara, thirty-six years old, was a pretty woman. She was slim and strong with long auburn hair, and not one white strand in it. Now her hair was matted and stringy, her face swollen almost twice its normal size.

  The new preacher at Little Zion Methodist arrived at the hospital. Reverend Charlie Poole stood in the hallway, put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and hung his head, saying few words.

  Tom’s cousin’s wife, Martina, picked up Wesley from school. The boy did not know what happened other than his mother was in the hospital and that he could not go back home.

  James Luke had been off work on Monday from his job at the highway department, but nobody could find him, and Nelda was at the bank in Pickleyville where she worked as a teller. She’d heard the news within a half an hour of Sara’s admission to the hospital ER. Her boss allowed her to leave work early, and she went directly to the hospital.

  During the time Sara suffered at the Ninth Ward Hospital, Wesley worked with a handsaw and hammer, building a birdhouse out of scrap lumber in Martina and Sid Hardin’s backyard. He was always building something with wood, drawing sketches of things around the farm and forest, oftentimes helping his father with projects on the home place. He’d won a blue ribbon at the parish fair in Ruthberry for an oil painting of their barn. Now he sat beneath a Chinaberry tree and cut boards while holding them steady on the wooden table. After he was done sawing, he concentrated on keeping the boards secure while nailing together the sides of the little birdhouse with a rusty claw hammer. Boyhood was its own balm, its own natural protection against the blow
s and hardness of the surrounding adult world. When he looked at the finished birdhouse, he couldn’t wait to show his mother and father.

  At the hospital in Pickleyville, Tom longed for his wife’s healing. The only consolation to her injuries was that she was still alive and breathing on her own, which offered him some hope. She lay there broken, her body crippled by the attack. Tom sat outside the ward in the hallway. The smell of ammonia was in the air. Though he appreciated Nelda and the preacher’s presence, he could find little comfort in it.

  His thoughts raged. He needed to find the man who’d left his wife for dead. But his heart was at odds, torn between health and vengeance, an ungracious emotion that left him in anguish. He knew if he could get his hands around the neck of the man who did this to his wife, he’d offer no quarter. And in his mind he had only one possible suspect: Sloan Parnell.

  “You want any coffee?” Reverend Poole asked.

  “Yes,” Tom said, waking from the nightmare ever so briefly.

  “Let’s go get us some. The coffee’s down the hall.”

  So the two men walked the corridor to the hospital cafeteria and drank for a half an hour. After they finished the coffee, the pastor prayed with Tom for his wife’s restoration and strength to weather this calamity through the mercy of God.

  Four days later, Sara was out of the coma but still in the hospital. The doctors said in time she would recuperate, though her shoulder was broken and there were other injuries to her face and genitalia. She could barely speak. Several of her teeth had been knocked out during the attack, and she was struck with an inexplicable palsy on one side of her face.