Zion

by Dayne Sherman

  Tom aimed the flashlight into the cab. The window was rolled down, the door shut, but there was no driver. Sloan was missing.

  “You think he ran off?” Tom asked.

  James Luke peered into the empty cab. “No, I don’t think so. I bet he got slung out.”

  Tom thought about his father’s watch, and the clear truth of finding it in the truck. Now Sloan’s blood guilt was irrefutable. Anger filled Tom’s chest. He wanted to bring justice to the man who’d done such harm to his wife and family.

  They called out to Sloan and began searching along the path that his truck had taken before it crashed under one of the hardwood trees that dotted the pasture. This was not a good pasture, just a thick area, partly forested, rangeland for scrub cattle, not Fitz-Blackwell property, but private land owned by some dirt farmer by the looks of it. As they walked, wild-eyed cows ran along in front of the wrecked Scout, staring into the headlights.

  “I see him,” Tom hollered.

  James Luke was ten paces behind.

  Sloan lay face down over the top of a bramble of briars and vines, his head lower than his torso, his face submerged in a snaky pile of saw briars, blackberry, and fallen limbs.

  The two men stood gazing down a moment. Tom’s flashlight traced the body. At a distant house a pen full of hounds barked.

  “Let’s get him out of there, see if he’s alive,” Tom said. The sight of Sloan’s limp body quickened his spirit, and the hate emptied in a moment.

  “Shit man, we were about to kill the no-good bastard,” James Luke countered, the Colt hanging from his hand.

  “We need to see if he’s alive.” Tom said.

  James Luke grimaced. “No, we don’t need to see nothing but that old road out yonder.”

  They argued for a minute. Then the two men fished Sloan’s limp body out of the thicket. His face was mangled with deep cuts, and he was bloody. He was unconscious but seemed to be breathing a little. Tom thought he could feel the faintest pulse on his wrist as he gripped it, but he wasn’t sure.

  “Let’s leave his ass be. He won’t live no time, the shape he’s in. We need to get the devil’s hell out of here,” James Luke said.

  “I’d like to go, but I believe we need to see if he’s going to make it,” Tom said. He’d come out of his moral stupor. He wanted legitimate justice to be served. He wanted to check the arm for the dog bite, to get more evidence to show the law what he did to Sara.

  They stood looking down at Sloan.

  Tom said, “I want you to go to the nearest house and call an ambulance and the law for me. That’s what I want you to do.”

  James Luke shook his head. “Damn it, Tom. What the hell are you thinking? Are you crazy? You’re going to get us charged with something serious.”

  “I need to see to it that he is looked after by a doctor,” Tom said. “I need to make sure he is prosecuted for trying to kill my wife if he lives. Anything less is a betrayal to Sara. I need to look for some wounds from Jubal’s bite. I want to see it with my own eyes.”

  “Kill him. Or leave him to die on his own. Don’t do anything less.”

  “No, I’ll have no part of that. We need an ambulance. You get one or I will.”

  James Luke stared at Tom. “Then take the damned pistol,” James Luke said, handing him the .45 automatic.

  “Okay,” Tom said, slipping the gun into his waistband, unsure why he took it.

  James Luke turned and left for the roadway.

  Tom kneeled beside Sloan and thought. After a couple of minutes, he remembered to look at Sloan’s left arm for the dog bite. The female caller had said his left arm was injured from the big dog’s jaws, so he unsnapped the left cuff at the sleeve. He held the flashlight under one armpit to free up his hands. He rolled the sleeve to the elbow. The arm was unscathed, not one sore or lesion of any kind on it. Nothing was there. He used his Barlow pocketknife to cut the sleeve all the way to the shoulder, and it was as clean as a new whistle.

  Confused more now than before, Tom used the pocketknife to cut the right sleeve. He turned Sloan’s arm around into the flashlight beam. There was plenty of blood. He cut the sleeve farther up to the shoulder and saw the compound fracture. A sharp bone stuck through his lower right deltoid that almost made Tom retch, but he kept studying the arm. He found nothing there attributable to Jubal’s thick jaws. Not a single fang mark left by the dog.

  Tom took off his own jacket and covered the man’s body. With his handkerchief, he wiped some accumulated blood from the sliced face and neck. It was cold out, and now Tom felt an additional chill. He did not know what to think. It occurred to him to pray, but he did not know what for. His wife’s healing? A prayer for this dead man before him? Prayer for his own redemption? Tom became disoriented, and for a moment incapable of doing anything at all. He felt stunned and stared at the man lying prone before him. He wondered how he came to kneel in this place and thought James Luke was one of the reasons.

  He stuck his face into his hands until James Luke and the deputy sheriff arrived. Soon after, the marshal and a state trooper drove up, and then some medics from Pickleyville arrived to carry Sloan to the Ninth Ward Hospital.

  As the ambulance was about to leave, P.T. Parnell, Sloan’s father, pulled into the cow pasture in his blue Cadillac. He was drunk, so hammered that he fell into an armadillo hole and broke his hip and had to be driven to the same hospital as his dying son.

  “We just saw the taillights in the woods,” James Luke said to the officers. “The fence was busted and down. I reckon he had drunk too much hard liquor. He smelled like a whiskey barrel.”

  Tom said nothing at all, shivering in his thin shirt, nodding. Agreeing to everything as a witness. His denim jacket was covered in blood and completely ruined.

  Sloan Parnell was pronounced dead at the little hospital in Pickleyville ten minutes after his arrival. His neck was broken, the coroner’s autopsy would say once it was complete. He was dead from a traffic accident, less than a mile away from his father’s camp on Lizard Bayou.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On the day of the Parnell funeral, Marshal Brownlow drove to the Hardin home. Jubal barked, tugging on his chain, acting as if he would take the tire off the patrol car if he could get anywhere near it. Wesley called to his father who was nailing some loose boards onto a holding pen that he was building for hogs, a temporary place to keep them until he took the last one to the auction.

  Brownlow met Tom at the pigpen gate. He said, “I don’t know what part you played in the wreck, you and old Cate, but I figure Sloan had it coming. I don’t want to follow up on any of it. I’d like to leave it be. I understand Red Tadlock put him in his truck, and he was shitfaced intoxicated when he died. That’s what Tadlock told me,” the marshal said.

  “We had no role in the wreck whatsoever. We just found him.” Tom stood with a claw hammer in his hand and a nail apron fastened to his trim waist.

  “You were out yonder chasing him. That much is clear.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

  “Look, I just don’t want no more wars between you and Fitz-Blackwell. No more fighting between nobody and the timber companies in the Ninth Ward. I don’t give a damn what happens in the Sixth or the Eighth Ward or anywhere else. The old ways of free-ranging and traipsing all over timber company land without permission is over. The open range hogs and cattle is over for good in Baxter Parish, and it ain’t coming back in your lifetime or mine. Being able to run stock on timber company land is done and finished. It’s all gone now. This here is the New South, and the old way of doing things is no more. The man that attacked your wife is dead and buried as far as I’m concerned. The investigation is closed shut. A woman called my office the other day and said Sloan did it and some shit about your daddy’s watch that was stole and whatnot, but the watch wasn’t in the cab of the truck like she said it ought to be. I checked on it myself. I don’t understand it all, mind you. But all of the investigations are over with, even Sara’s attack. I
spoke to the High Sheriff, and we’re done looking into it. As a matter of fact, I called Judge Parnell, and he said that Sloan’s heavy drinking was what killed him dead. He was surely surprised that he ain’t already died ten years ago from it.”

  Tom nodded.

  “I’m going to trust things are back to normal,” Brownlow said.

  “Whatever you say, Marshal. Far as I’m concerned, I’m at peace with all men.”

  “Great to know it. Another thing. Some of us are getting together a hunting lease with Fitz-Blackwell, and I wanted to invite you to join as a charter member—on account of what you’ve gone through and your place in this community. The lease’ll cover all of their land in the south end of the parish. You’ll be able to hunt anytime you want, just no running stock. I sure would like you to join. It won’t cost more than fifty bucks a year for charter members. You and Wesley can join up together as a family for fifty bucks.”

  Tom stared at the lawman and was quiet. There was an uncomfortable pause. Then he said, “No, I believe I’d just as soon pass.”

  “Think on it a while, will you?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sara’s body healed in due course, and the family made adjustments to confront their sorrow. They tried to love each other more, tried to make something good come from the tragedy.

  Tom caught the last of the hogs and cattle from the woods and sold them at the auction, keeping none back for home use. As the hospital bills started rolling in, he sold all of them. Every last hog. The check was a mere pittance, but he needed every nickel of it.

  After dispersing the cows and hogs, he sold his horse Sam, too, as well as his Simco roping saddle. Sara’s hospital bill was still formidable, but he worked out a payment plan, largely done through his own integrity and willingness to confront the debt. He visited the chief of the hospital, Dr. Beau Oxford, face-to-face, and they set up a monthly schedule of payments.

  But what tore at Tom day and night was how close he had come to killing an innocent man. He couldn’t understand how Sloan was not the man who’d assaulted his wife, but the lack of a dog bite told the tale. The crazy phone call from the woman about the pocket watch and the wound made him even more confused and confounded. He didn’t know what to make of it. It vexed him like a sore tooth that wouldn’t stop worrying his mouth. If not Sloan Parnell, then who else did it? Who or what did he have to defend against? Who might come again to attack Sara and his family? It was as if a spirit had come into their lives and left to return in the future.

  One morning he went out to feed Jubal and the other dogs some scraps from the kitchen, leftover bread and bones soaked in bacon grease. He stood in front of Jubal and rubbed his head and ears, the dog smiling a wide bulldog smile, more interested in the affection of his master than the pan of food. Tom spoke to him like a friend. “Jubal, who did it? What happened that day?”

  The dog answered with the same silence that he got from Sara, the same silence from the marshal, and the same silence coming from the dangerous act of trying to get the truth out of Sloan Parnell. Tom did not know who was out there lurking and stalking. No answer came, nothing but silence with its desperate finality.

  The whole landscape seemed to change. Sometimes Tom could hear saws and machinery working on the new interstate that was being built a few miles away from Zion, a section of the Eisenhower National Highway System. Day by day the open range conflict began to fade into the distant past. Truth be told, there were few young pines left to burn, and folks simply gave up the war in despair of challenging the new stock law or stopping the killing of the oaks. Fitz-Blackwell won, and the people lost.

  One evening during a late December chill, Tom sat at the kitchen table with his head in his palms. The gas heater burned in the corner of the room, a blue flame sharp and warm. He had never been a man given to melancholy, but there were times after Sloan’s death when he was overcome with disorientation and guilt, as if he faced a solid wall with no way to go around it or scale it. He wondered if Sloan had realized that he was being followed, and if he’d responded by burying his foot down on the accelerator. Tom remembered how Sloan looked over at James Luke before he left the bar, and Tom saw his face when he acknowledged James Luke’s presence. It was the look of petrifaction and instantaneous acknowledgement of his own mortality. Perhaps their presence in the bar might be reason enough for him to believe he was being followed, even if he never saw them trailing on the roadway.

  “Tommy,” Sara said, “it’s over.” He looked up at his wife who stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Her shoulder was out of the sling, and a dental bridge was made to cover her missing teeth. Her hair had been a deep auburn, but it was becoming gray, turning silver, a physical reminder of the attack.

  “What’s over?” he asked.

  “My rape and Sloan Parnell’s death, and if you keep dwelling on it all, you’ll pine away and leave this world dying an early and needless death. You’re no good to me and Wesley like this.”

  Tom was dazed. Neither of them had ever said the word “rape” before in the company of the other, never once. His head shook in self-recrimination and bewilderment.

  She stepped closer. “It happened to me, not you, and I’ve got to go on with life and so do you.”

  He stood and embraced Sara, knowing that this hell needed to be put away, the brokenness mended. For the first time, he understood that he needed to bury the past. Right then he resolved to leave behind the business of free range livestock and the old grudges. He resolved to leave behind Sloan Parnell’s death or to try his best to let go of the violation against his wife and home.

  After a minute passed, he let her go. He stared at her face and hair, and he promised her that he’d leave it all behind and quit grieving over the past.

  She stepped back. “I’ll say one more thing. If I can get well enough in my mind, I’m going to get a job in town. I’m tired of sitting in this damned house day after day, year after year. I won’t sit here the rest of my life.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  They embraced again, kissed, and soon went to bed and to sleep.

  The following Sunday, Tom, Sara, and Wesley returned to Little Zion Methodist Church after almost two months away. They sat in their regular pew. Tom could see the marshal where he sat next to his wife and daughter several pews ahead of them to the left, across the center aisle of the sanctuary. It was the Brownlow family’s turn to light the Advent candles. Donald, Mary Anne, and their daughter Priscilla gave a short Bible reading, and they played their part in the service, lighting the candles to mark the season.

  The piano played Christmas carols and hymns, and the song leader stood waving his arms to the music. They sang “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” “Away in a Manger,” “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,” and “Joy to the World.”

  After the congregation finished the hymn singing, they listened to a sermon by Reverend Poole as he preached of God’s eternal faithfulness, his fidelity and sacrifice, and our need to be holy and faithful in return, all of it bound together in a bloodstained tapestry of mercy, grace, and love. He said none of it made sense without God’s gift to the world through the birth of a little baby laid in a Bethlehem manger.

  It was the Sunday before Christmas, 1964.

  PART II: NOON

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It surprised Tom how he prospered after removing the hogs and cattle from the woods. The world was changing, and he changed along with it. For seven years he had worked at the local junior college as a journeyman carpenter, and served for the past three years as the foreman of the shop. Sara worked across campus at the library, having begun her job in August 1965, several years before he took the position at the college. Tom worked at the Ponderosa, a maintenance complex based in and around a giant Quonset hut that had been salvaged from World War II surplus. The shop was named after the home of Ben Cartwright’s ranch on Bonanza. As a civil servant, Tom gave an honest day’s work for a day’s pay. As a car
penter, he worked at the college but was never really a part of the town and gown. More than once he discussed with his wife the possibility of completing his associate’s degree, but he hated to submit himself to the arrogant professors, who came in two varieties: those who held maintenance workers in contempt and those who did not even recognize their existence as human beings. He was willing to work for them, but not study under them.

  Monday, May 20, 1974, was Tom’s fiftieth birthday. Sara had made him a German chocolate cake and brought it over to the shop for lunch to share it with the men who worked there. Harvey Shaffer, a carpenter, brought fresh fillet catfish and fried them on a propane cooker outside the building, the fish turning golden brown in the big black skillet. Hours later, Tom was still full from the hearty meal.

  Dub Freeman, a student worker, helped Tom steady a sheet of plywood. They stood at the table saw in the Quonset hut. It was hot inside the metal building, even with two five-foot tall fans blowing at each end of the shop. In front of them lay the sheet of plywood he was trying to cut, ripping it down the middle with a ten-inch table saw blade. Tom flipped the switch to the electric motor on the saw. The blade whirled, and it screamed when it entered the wood, the sound stinging his ears. He was careful to make the cut smooth, keeping the plywood as steady and as tight as he could on the big table. He was aware that a careless move could cost him a finger or worse.

  After it was split down the middle, he placed one of the pieces on the back of a frame he’d built for a professor’s bookshelf. He was fashioning this solid, functional shelf for a faculty member’s office in Rayburn Hall. He wished he had the budget to buy oak or perhaps birch, which stained nicely, instead of this god-awful pine, but he did the best he could with the materials the college could afford.