Tom stayed seated on the front porch as Wesley went into the yard to his Maverick. He watched Wesley pack the trunk. “Where do you want to meet me for the money?” he asked.
“How much is it?” Wesley said.
“About eight hundred dollars, I think.”
“I’ll meet you at the bank on your lunch hour tomorrow. The new drive-through branch over on Thomas Jefferson. At noon.”
“Well, tomorrow’s Memorial Day. It’ll be closed.”
“Then make it Tuesday.”
“Okay.” Tom watched his son go to the car, get in, slam the door, and grind the starter. It wouldn’t crank. He could see Wesley pounding the steering wheel with his palms, and he almost went out to help, but then the Maverick engine caught, and the boy left the yard fast, up the gravel driveway and onto the blacktop road.
Tom scanned the yard, which seemed empty and void. At that moment, he felt washed up as a man, never amounting to much, never really accomplishing anything to speak of. He never left the old home place, the little piece of land and house he’d inherited from his father. His mother died when he was nineteen. When he married Sara, she moved into the family home with Tom and his aged father, who died six months later. Over the years they remodeled the house and updated it, much of the work done with Wesley’s help. They’d built an additional laundry and den on the backside of the house, as well as the master bath. It was a good and adequate home, and he hoped to leave it to his son one day. Even if it wasn’t much, it would be a little something. But this did not show much accomplishment or exhibit a great deal of ambition. Home was all he ever wanted, a good home place. That was his chief ambition in life, to make a home and keep it. Now it appeared to be falling apart at the seams like a cheap pair of boots.
He did not want to deal with Sara’s scorn due to his stance against the Claiborne job. Now for a moment he wished he could return back to the old days when he’d go check on his cows or ride his horse into the woods and hunt, maybe call James Luke and go find some raccoons at night with a good dog, maybe have a Catahoula bulldog chained in the yard to guard the place. Nelda and James Luke split two weeks after Sloan Parnell’s wreck. Tom lost one of his closest buddies. Truth be told, he rarely thought about James Luke except in rare moments. Now the past didn’t add up, nor did the present. Tom had no horse and no hunting dogs, no place to hunt on open range, all of the timber company land now leased to hunting clubs. Much of the old hunting land sold for developments because of its close proximity to the interstate highway. Now trailer parks and a few poorly planned subdivisions dotted the old hunting grounds. He never joined a hunting club. Perhaps for the first time, he came to look at the period of the 1950s and early 1960s as the good old days, but then he recalled his broken wife and the dead body of Sloan and questioned even that memory.
He longed for something else. Perhaps a little peace and quiet, a little tranquility of home and hearth. He wanted to shake Charity’s image from his mind altogether. He wondered if he was going to lose his wife, too, in addition to his son. They’d not passed a kind word between each other since the picnic. Trouble was all around him like a haunting for past deeds coming back to find a resting place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The marshal was aggravated and cranky. He didn’t like being stuck in bed and unable to do anything, laid up like an invalid at Pickleyville’s two-bit Ninth Ward General Hospital. The hospital was within his jurisdiction and funded by the same taxes as the Ninth Ward Court and his office. He told everyone who came to visit that he was unable to rest with nurses poking him and prodding him at all hours of the day and night, the hospital stay a type of unfettered harassment.
The doctors said he was lucky to be alive. More than once he wished he’d died from the pain in his chest. He was on the verge of open heart surgery, or so the cardiologist from New Orleans told him, and his arteries were tight with blockages, as tight as a boxer’s fist. But he didn’t want his sternum cracked open like the shell of a boiled crab. Worse, unlike a crab, he wouldn’t receive the charity of being dead before the cracking. They would have to send him to New Orleans or Baton Rouge to do the procedure. The doctors thought he might get by without a surgery, but he had to lose weight, nearly one hundred pounds, quit smoking immediately, and begin taking medication for the blockages. In addition to the heart condition, his sugar was high and staying that way, often resting at three hundred points. He was not a well man, his body a case study in premature morbidity.
His wife Mary Anne was at his side constantly and rarely left him. But Sunday afternoon, she went home for a rest and to do some house work. He could still see the deep concern across her brow when she departed from the hospital room, as if he could tell that she still thought she might lose him.
However, the marshal had a sense that he was not yet ready to finish the race. He had some work left to be done, and he had an accusation of murder and the bizarre testimony of Charity Claiborne to deal with. Not to mention, the whole case of Sara Hardin’s attack had come back into focus, a case long closed that needed to be responded to as soon as he was able. To get to the bottom of all of this would take time and effort. No one else would do it. He was sure of that.
He prayed to live on. Others prayed fervently, plenty of others. He was on every church prayer list in the Ninth Ward of Baxter Parish, both Protestant and Catholic, black and white. To clear things up with Charity’s ongoing fiasco, he had to be fit to work. He swallowed hard, the drip needle piercing his skin and stinging, the tape holding down the stainless steel spike on his bruised hand.
At first, he was glad that Mary Anne spent time at the hospital. But he was happy now whenever she left him alone for a while. He needed a break from her hovering. She crocheted and tried to engage him in talk, but he did not want to chat aimlessly. After thirty-three years of marriage, he’d about run out of unnecessary small talk. She told her husband that the preacher called the day before and said he was coming to visit in her absence. He asked Mary Anne to tell the preacher to bring Tom Hardin along for the company. Brownlow was simply ambivalent about the minister and his approach to the church and community. He’d seen Methodist preachers come and go at Little Zion Church. Some were good, others fair, and two or three were honest to God rogues by the marshal’s own estimation. Poole had been the longest tenured minister at the church by far, and this was attributed to his job as a high school English teacher. He didn’t want to leave town or his job teaching, and the bishop chose to keep him at Little Zion. This minister wasn’t bad, but simply average. Despite his lack of enthusiasm over the preacher, at least he might have something different to talk about for a little while, something other than Mary Anne’s constant chatter.
He hoped the minister could persuade Tom to come to the hospital, which was important for his latest investigation now stalled by a heart attack. He wanted to get a feel for where Tom stood on the events in 1964. All of this could wait. Brownlow was tired. He closed his eyes and tried to take a nap, tried to get a little rest if at all possible before the preacher and Tom arrived.
Late Sunday evening, Reverend Poole drove his Oldsmobile to Tom’s house from the parsonage and then to the hospital. In the car, Tom spoke about his work at the junior college campus. He never brought up the struggle with Wesley or the conflict over the Claiborne project. He’d never really confided in Poole or any other minister at the church over the years. There was a private nature about Tom that often prevented him from seeking guidance or help from others.
But there was nostalgia in Tom’s mind. He and the minister reminisced about the old days when he used to run cattle and hogs in the woodlands and the period afterward when he made the transition from jack-of-all-trades and woodsman to civil service worker at the junior college maintenance department. Tom rarely spoke of the period, the pine tree wars, or the simultaneous damage to his wife and family. Today, he was stuck in a quandary and was trying to find his way out of it by looking to the past.
“You think
Donald’s going to pull through?” Tom asked the minister, as he looked out of the Oldsmobile window at the roadside desolation of a Baxter Parish sunset. He rarely went to the hospital except for visiting with the minister when someone was sick in the church.
“There’s no way to tell, but I think he’s going to be okay. I spoke to the cardiologist and he seemed pretty hopeful. Donald appears to be coming along, but he’s not out of the woods yet. Biggest thing is, he’s got to push himself away from the table and give up the smokes,” Poole said. Reverend Poole was a slim man and the only person in Zion to take up jogging in the 1970s. He was the closest thing to being a health nut in the area.
“Do you ever get tired of going to hospitals and visiting sick people?” Tom asked.
“Well, sometimes I get a little weary of it, distracted mostly. But this is about all I know to do. Preaching is the easy part of my work. A hair-lipped spider monkey could be trained in homiletics, but visiting the sick and the soul-worn is one of the few authentically Christian things that I ever do except for conducting funerals. Most of my work is administrative, and that’s not even real ministry at all. It’s bureaucratic. I try to stick to doing visitation and sometimes let the other work slide. My most important ministry is dealing with the ill, the dying, and the dead. Like John Wesley said, ‘I am always in haste, but never in a hurry.’ I take time with these issues. Both my father and uncle were Methodist ministers, and I knew well what I was getting into when I accepted the call to service and went into the parish ministry.”
Tom followed the minister through the hallways, his mind elsewhere, his thoughts on the challenges at home. The hospital halls were antiseptic, institutional white in color. The air was cool on Tom’s arms, even though he wore a long sleeve dress shirt, the same clothes he’d worn to church in the morning.
He was worried about Wesley. They’d always worked together, spent time together on projects. For all intents and purposes, they were business partners since his son turned twelve years old. They were close, he thought. Wesley had never before entered into a particularly rebellious stage, and Tom felt a measure of uncertainty over the conflict. He’d never faced anything like it before. This problem originated with Charity Claiborne. This much was sure. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone, leave the work arrangements to her husband? Tom was not sure he’d handled it properly. He began to think that he should have humored the crazy woman and taken up business matters later with Dr. Claiborne. Maybe he could have dealt with it all by tripling his fee. Force them to pick somebody else to do the work. If they accepted the exorbitant price, he could contract out the project to another carpenter—give the work to Lucky Smith, a subordinate at the maintenance department who was poor as a barn lizard and in need of money for his wife and seven kids.
He wished that he’d handled things differently, though he still didn’t regret declining Charity’s business. He did not want to work directly with her under any circumstances, and he had certain prerogatives and rights as a craftsman.
The minister checked in at the nurse’s station. The dour woman at the desk never spoke. She just nodded as she counted ink pens, and he walked to the room, Tom behind him.
The marshal eased up in his bed to greet the visitors, a broad scowl across his face. His supper sat uneaten on the stainless steel tray beside his bed. He looked at the meal, staring at it briefly. “Either of y’all want to eat this stuff? It’s so bad it would kill a wild boar dead in his tracks.”
“No, I think I’ll pass,” the minister said, smiling. “You need to eat so you can keep up your strength.”
Tom shook his head, frowned.
“I’m not sure that a root hog would eat it, Reverend. An old hog might have to chase the nurse down the hall to get something of virtue to eat,” the marshal said. He winked and made a crooked smile.
“You holding up okay, ready to go back home?” the minister asked.
“Might as well be holding up. Dying won’t do me no good. Fact of business, being dead’ll make a whole bunch of people I don’t like happy that I’m finally gone. So I intend to stick it out a while. At least till the Lord’s ready for me.”
The two visitors sat in chairs and made small talk, telling a few stories, listening to the marshal complain about the hospital, hearing him recite the petty indignities of being ill. Reverend Poole tried to act upbeat, chipper, sounding as positive as a Fuller Brush Man standing at a widow’s front door trying to make a sale. Being upbeat was a Methodist preacher’s primary vocational requirement.
After twenty minutes, the minister said he needed to go see Mrs. Inez Jones, a church member facing gallbladder surgery in another hospital ward. He led Brownlow and Tom in a brief prayer for healing and strength.
Tom stood to leave with him, but the marshal waved for him to stay. “Look, if it won’t be an undue hardship, Reverend Poole, I’d just as soon have Tom stay right here with me while you go down the hall for your other ministry visit. We can talk here while you’re visiting the sick.”
Reverend Poole glanced at Tom. He said he’d return shortly and left the room.
Tom thought that this was a little odd, but he didn’t mind waiting. The fact that the marshal had asked the minister to bring him along in the first place must have meant that he wanted to talk about something. He sat down in the straight-backed chair, and took a deep breath.
There was silence as if the two men were sizing up each other for a contest of some kind.
“We got us a real problem,” the marshal said, “and I was tending to it when I had this damned heart attack. Serious trouble is brewing.”
“What is it?” Tom asked. The grave look on Brownlow’s bloated and puffy face caused him alarm. The marshal seemed to be in some form of distress talking about the trouble at hand.
“These doctors aim to kill me to make me better. If it wasn’t for my wife and daughter, I’d tell them to leave me the hell alone so I could roll over and die like an old dog. Well, that’s not true. I’ve got plenty to do yet, and I don’t reckon I’ll ever get caught up with it till I die or retire. And I plan to be retired at the end of this year. Not too many people know it yet.” The marshal pushed himself up higher in the bed and almost smiled.
A nurse barged into the room and the marshal told her to turn around and leave. He was involved in official police business. She stayed a few seconds to let him see that she was offended, but left without saying a word.
“Don’t let ’em kill you,” Tom said.
“No, I plan not to. But I’m glad you came here today. When I was hit with the attack, I was intending to call on you. Tom, I’m going to go on and put the cards on the table for you. Charity LeBlanc, that damned hellacious woman, and I won’t dare call her a lady, came to see me,” he said.
Tom didn’t like the turn in the conversation. He hated to hear Charity’s name, especially after the mess at the barbeque on Friday and the trouble with Wesley, everything flowing from it like feces rolling downhill. He began to think of her as his mortal enemy, an absolute foe. He gripped the edge of his chair with his right hand, the veins in his forearm.
“She’s caused me some grief recently,” the marshal continued. “It’s not the first time, but she’s gone and done it again. What she says is she’s been hit with the Holy Ghost at Brother Thad Hussert’s church in Milltown, them sons-a-bitching Pentecostals, no offense intended to anybody’s religion. That Brother Hussert calls himself ‘The Apostle,’ if you dare believe it, and according to what she says, her newly revived faith has got a hold of her, and she’s now started confessing her past sins. She came to my office on Tuesday of last week to lay down a burden, and she claims that she made some anonymous phone calls to me and you back in ’64, and that it caused all kinds of violence. I ain’t completely clear that’s what it was all about, but I don’t hardly know anymore. People are so damned crazy nowadays.” He was taking short breaths from talking too much.
“What have I got to do with her?” Tom asked. Now b
oth of his hands were clasping the arms of the chair on each side of his thighs. He squeezed the wood tight, gripping and then releasing. He realized she’d gone to see the marshal one day after he and Wesley had gone to the Claiborne House and refused the job.
“Tom, I hate to tell you some of the nutty-assed allegations she said about you and your wife, but it’s been dropped into my lap, and I’ve got to go address it straightway. I don’t even want to bring up the old history, now long passed. But I’ve got so little choice left,” Brownlow said. He rubbed his finger on his forehead to remove a line of sweat. “She says that Sloan Parnell did not rape your wife.”
“Okay. What’s new about that? I pretty much figured that out myself.”
“Well, instead she says you and Jim Cate killed Sloan, and Jim raped and beat your wife himself. That’s a real hard pill to swallow. She says Jim and Sloan Parnell both were sleeping with Sara, some kind of love triangle, and that Jim did the raping and beating on Sara when he found out that she was running around with Sloan, too. On top of all that, she accuses you of killing Sloan and burning down the old Parnell place, and she’s going to tell Judge Parnell directly.”
“It’s all a lie. It’s just a damned lie,” Tom said. He stood up without thinking. “My wife did no such thing.” He pointed at the marshal with his index finger.
“Tom, please sit on back down,” Brownlow said. “We’re just getting started.”
Tom sat. He appeared ashen, one lone tear emerging from the duct in his right eye and staying there, never falling. His jaw trembled.
“Did you burn down the old Parnell place?” asked the marshal.
“No, I never burned anything, not a single pine tree,” Tom said.
“Do you know who burned down the Parnell place?”
“No.”
“She says Sloan was sleeping with Sara, and she told Jim about it during a phone call one day. Then Jim tricked you into going after Sloan out of pure revenge. Undoubtedly, Jim coaxed you into doing it to cover up for what he’d had done to Sara, maybe. Charity says Jim was championing Sloan’s death—and that either you or he did it alone or both did it in some kind of a conspiracy. I don’t know what to think. Of course, I looked into Sloan’s death back then and found it to be an accident. This is all a bunch of trouble. Now I’ve got to investigate the accusations. I don’t know what to believe, but there’s bound to be some truth in it somewhere. There’s always a little truth in every damned lie. What I’ve got to deal with more than anything is if you had any part of Sloan’s death. That’s the big question I’ve got to answer.”
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