She took the day off from work after meeting with the marshal, calling in sick. She pulled the pack of cigarettes from her purse. Tom didn’t even know that she smoked. She could wait two or three days if necessary before she lit one, before the flash of fire and the hot breath of nicotine. The woman could then be satisfied with one draw if that was all she had available. It was half the joy to realize she could smoke and Tom, her husband of so many years, didn’t know it. His daily schedule and structure lent to this and other deceptions great and small. She could smoke on the back step or in the yard. And if he smelled something, she’d blame it on a neighbor who’d come over to visit earlier in the day. It was this private world that gave her pleasure, like the pages of a banned novel offering delight through its taboo.
Wesley knew about her cigarettes, but there was an unwritten agreement between them. He was never to speak about her smoking in front of his father, which signified a note of loyalty they had for one another, a bond of loyalty and subversion they held together as one since his birth.
With the marshal’s investigation menacing, the series of falsehoods that made up Sara Hardin’s life was essentially over and she knew it. Two decades of attending Little Zion Methodist Church had taught her that the only clear pathway to salvation was through heartfelt repentance and holy living, but the hard edges of her life were closing in around her. The attempt at controlling the world was destined to end badly. She put down her cigarette, and the smoke made a half-circle in the ashtray on the window sill in the kitchen. She poured herself two fingers of vodka in a porcelain coffee cup. This was her chosen spirit, a secret drink without any smell and as clear as water. She had loved to drink it with Sloan and James Luke and other men over the years. Sometimes she liked to sip intrigue beyond just dusty old books in the library. Though she was stranded in Zion, Louisiana, she was free to roam elsewhere in her daydreams. For years, she could escape through sex during secret rendezvous with men. Now every swallow of vodka reminded her of the past.
She could see her accuser’s face, Charity Claiborne’s lurid smile. The woman’s eyes, the sun-scorched crow’s feet covered up by makeup, the cost of sin and strife, the late night carousing that never ended. Sara had been nominally Baptist before marrying Tom, dunked in the Shipley Creek outside of Blytheville, Arkansas, as a child. The Methodists were rarely negligent in lambasting sin, but who could hold court with the Baptists? Their only joy was in self-denial and self-loathing, putting sin under the blood of the Lamb. Either repent or hide from it, she learned, was the central message, and she chose the latter.
Sara walked out into the yard and took a final drag from the Viceroy cigarette and dropped the butt onto the ground to extinguish it with her heel. She then picked it up and emptied the remaining tobacco from the butt into the grass. She wrapped the filter into a piece of tinfoil and placed it inside her purse until she could find a safe place at work to throw it away. She put a piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum into her mouth to cover her breath and conceal the tobacco even more fully, and she cleaned out the ashtray with water from the sink and put it away in the kitchen cabinet where it stayed when she wasn’t smoking.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The marshal’s visit had persuaded James Luke to act, though he pondered it over the course of three weeks, trying to make a clear and precise plan. James Luke was sure that he had to do something about Charity. She was like a loose wheel on a car, and somebody was going to get hurt sooner rather than later. He decided to return to Pickleyville to take care of the trouble first hand.
A few days after the marshal came to Natchez, he told Heloise about a special fishing trip coming up that he’d been invited to attend with a bunch of Army Corps of Engineers bureaucrats. These men were several steps up the ladder, and he needed to get to know them for his own advancement. He said that he was going to an Army Corps reservoir near Hot Springs called DeGray Lake. They’d spend a few days fishing, drinking, and playing cards at the lake, and he’d use boats brought along by other men. He didn’t want to go, but it was all necessary business, Army Corps political games required to get ahead.
He told her about the trip while they were eating dinner at Queen’s Tavern in Natchez, the oldest standing building in town, which dated from the 1700s. They ate porterhouse steaks and drank red wine. When they were done with the steaks and waiting for dessert, they continued talking more about the fishing trip to Arkansas.
“James Luke, I fully understand the point behind the trip,” Heloise said. “Business is business, even if it’s government business. It’s all the same. Don’t feel guilty about leaving me.”
“That’s why I married you, honey. You’re a woman that understands how the world works,” he said.
“That I do,” she said.
“Well, take this for your prize for letting me go away for a few days,” James Luke said as he reached into his sport coat pocket and retrieved a new necklace, pearls that he’d bought for her in Jackson at Fondren Jewelers. He displayed it to her in the velvet case and then stood and put it around her neck.
“My dear, you’re one of a kind,” she said.
“I know it,” said James Luke as he kissed her cheek and rubbed her shoulders.
On Friday, July 26th, he packed the Suburban. He loaded it with food and camping supplies, his canvas sleeping bag, Coleman lantern, and a propane cooker. He prepared a week’s worth of dehydrated vegetables and plenty of water. He could stay longer than a week depending on how he rationed the food and if he caught any fish, or so he told his wife. But it was all a ruse. This was just a precaution. Indeed, he planned to be back not long before midnight on Sunday evening. He hid the Remington Gamemaster deer rifle with a scope in the truck the night before. It was nestled away in a steel storage box with plenty of ammunition. He was going on a journey, but not to catch any fish.
The marshal’s visit itself had not bothered him too much, though he wasn’t disregarding it in the least. James Luke was used to jostling with lawmen through his rent houses, the clandestine drug activity, and his regular work as a field supervisor on the take with the Army Corps. He had bought and paid for several lawmen on both sides of the river since coming to Mississippi, and he learned that they mostly wanted the pretense of power, and that their loyalty was always offered to the highest bidder or it went to the most aggressive sycophant in their midst. What did bother him, however, was Charity’s constant talking. That was the real threat, and he saw no choice but to stop it. She wasn’t rational, so he needed to shut her up fast.
Much of James Luke’s approach to human affairs was learned in Korea. The military lessons were just as true now as they were in 1951. He faced the same kind of duplicity and human emotions, the exact same hypocrisy. He was usually taking something away from a person and knew the processes for forcing things to go in his direction. He believed stealing wasn’t stealing if you got to keep the booty of war free and clear, and it didn’t matter what kind of war: personal or international. It didn’t matter as long as the winner took all.
He believed the easiest approach to break a person was not to torture him with inhumane cruelty, but to use either pandering or shame. Either exploit their egos or their guilt for a higher purpose, your own purpose. James Luke’s understanding of man’s natural weaknesses served him well, and he planned to use this knowledge in Baxter Parish.
When the marshal told him about the complaint coming forth all of these years later, he immediately knew who it was. Charity was the only person alive who knew what went on between him and Sara and Sloan—other than Sara herself—and if the marshal had come to see him after Sara’s erstwhile confession, it would have been with a warrant, he was sure of it.
He shared a bed with Charity at a camp on Lake Ponchatoula a number of times in 1963 and ’64, and he enjoyed her sex. He believed she was scared to death of him. He hit her a few times one night just for good measure, when she was acting like a religious nut, and she stayed away from him afterward. He knew her better th
an she knew herself, however, and he understood that her mind was scrambled like an egg in an electric blender. She was as crazy as a Christmas hen in a lightning storm. Though she had been granted eternal salvation, he thought it a tragedy that redemption of this sort would fail to make her remember her limits and her place in the world.
The .30-06 rifle and the .45 pistol, his old comrades, were taking the ride in case any trouble came to town. Though he mostly understood Charity’s state of nature, he never could be sure what religion might do to her perverted little mind. There was but one way to reason with her, and it was not like a normal person.
He looked down at his truck seat at his leather-covered Bible, the King James Version of 1611, a copy with red edges that reminded him of Jesus Christ bleeding on the cross. He knew what he’d do to talk sense into her: Beat her with the one book she respected until she either died or learned again how to behave herself and quit squawking to the law.
James Luke ordered a second gas tank when he bought the Suburban a year earlier. He had it installed in the undercarriage, a retrofit that cost him extra money at the dealership. This was just the kind of journey he had in mind when he added the tank with its twenty-five gallons of gas in escrow. It might come in handy one day. He wanted to keep a low profile, and the Chevrolet 454 lapped the gasoline at twelve miles per gallon in normal driving, and the high price of gas since the Arab oil embargo made James Luke curse. The four barrel carburetor was practically a sieve if he pressed down on the pedal. He didn’t want to gas up anywhere in Louisiana, so he took enough fuel to fulfill his little mission. In case things went awry, he had plenty enough for the trip there and back plus any essential excursions.
He could not remember the exact date of his last trip to Baxter Parish—or even his last time driving through the place. He seemed to think it was in 1967. Today, he drove east toward Meadville and then farther east past I-55 and to old Highway 51.
On the highway south of Summit, he listened to the radio. Fire and brimstone preachers and twangy gospel music always gave him a peculiar comfort for some indescribable reason. He preferred listening to the high drama of the Pentecostals, and their hard singsong voices punctuating the truck cab with the words of death and life.
An evangelist named Leviticus Showers gasped for air and breathed hard, as if the good news included a long marathon up a steep spiritual mountain that left the preacher seeking just enough oxygen to finish his sermon. The preacher on the AM station in McComb proclaimed, “The Lord is ever-following you with his watching eyes—AH-HA. His eye is upon your—AH-HA-LA—sinful ways day and night—AH-HA-SHA—night and day.” James Luke smiled as he listened to the preacher, an evangelist at the Full Faith Church in Progress, Mississippi. He was pleased to hear the message on his way through this hard and treacherous world. He could visualize the preacher sweating and wiping his forehead in the radio studio, his Bible wide open on a rusty music stand in front of him, the microphone square before his lips, not a single page of prepared notes in front of him.
But this message did not bring James Luke to a sublime religious experience. Instead, it was simply free entertainment, a way to pass the time when he drove. At best, God was a cosmic entertainer. James Luke had a peculiar fascination with the Almighty. He was drawn to any source of power, and he liked to observe devotion to a true master. Furthermore, he wanted to elicit fear rather than devotion. Devotion was cheap, but fear was a fine currency. He believed the fear of God was the beginning of power, and power was what James Luke liked most.
He planned for the battle. He was working hard to bring the parts together that had been dropped into his lap by Marshal Brownlow. James Luke would take the trouble to its natural end if necessary. He’d do whatever nature required, and then go back home to Natchez and his profitable work in the slums. “I’ll deal with flies by swatting them—AH-HA-SHA. Let the flies die, by God—AH-HA—or let them repent—AH-HA-SHA—of their sins against me,” he said, mimicking the evangelist on the radio station.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Marshal Brownlow cared for the citizens of the Ninth Ward with whom he was entrusted, families that he was charged to protect and serve. While he didn’t have as much energy as before the heart attack, he hoped he would compensate for the lack of strength with heightened wisdom and experience. He couldn’t be sure of this, but he didn’t take anything for granted either. Sometimes he wondered if he had learned anything significant in his fifty-four years of living. There was a better focus afforded by age that he understood came from his closeness to death. Yet he doubted his own wisdom now more often than not. Just working in the Marshal’s Office for his career was evidence of bad judgment in and of itself, he regularly told people. Any fool should know better than to do such a thing.
Death was coming soon like an old friend or neighbor stopping by for a visit. So he tried to keep watch over important matters. He’d been invited by fate to do what was crucial now and let the trivial fall by the wayside. The grave would soon call and say the hour was right for a final reunion, a call impossible to miss or refuse. During despondent moments, it seemed as if life was failing, going down like a shooting star. The job itself and the heavy responsibilities could cause his death before he could retire.
Regardless, he had been reunited with some old acquaintances, Sloan Parnell, Charity LeBlanc Claiborne, and James Luke Cate. These, along with Tom and Sara Hardin together, now resembled one big unhappy family. More like a circle of hate, the marshal thought.
One of the difficulties in dealing with Charity’s story was that he didn’t really know what he should do next. He didn’t have any new evidence at all. All he really had was the testimony of a crazy woman, a woman who said she was led by the Holy Ghost.
As a Methodist, the marshal believed in the Spirit, but not all spirits could be trusted. Didn’t the Bible say in First John to “test the spirits,” a verse he learned as a youth? He dared not forward anything to the District Attorney prematurely and create more havoc. And what was there to forward anyway? He had nothing to give the High Sheriff either, a man who cared not a whit about Zion or Lizard Bayou or the dealings down in the lower end of the parish. Sheriff Haltom Roberts had written off Zion and Milltown from his work responsibilities years earlier. The marshal was glad, because Roberts was always more trouble than he was worth, as rotten as a sack of putrid apples, corrupt all the way to the core.
He bet himself that if Charity went crying to Judge Parnell, it would cost him a hundred dollars’ worth of hell. So now he had to be sure, completely certain about who beat and raped Sara Hardin. Even the manner of Sloan’s death had to be questioned again. He had some suspicions that people were lying all around, everyone but Tom. In fact, he trusted that Tom was telling the truth, and as dangerous as it was to trust another man, he had to believe in Tom Hardin.
Yet the primary question remained. He had to solve the rape and beating that nearly killed Sara Hardin. Why didn’t she tell him the truth in 1964 or now in 1974? A secondary question was why were the two men following Sloan Parnell the night he died if not to kill him? Did all of these really loose fitting pieces fit together somehow like gears in a mechanism? Who was lying about what and why? Worst of all, the marshal began to doubt he still had the ability to follow the questions to accurate conclusions. It all might be too much for him now.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Sara reached for the small hope chest that her father had given her for her birthday the year before he left Blytheville for good. The chest was made from cedar and was smooth as glass. It was hidden in the top of the hallway closet. The chest was overhead, and she stood on a footstool to get it down. She could barely pull the thing down without dropping it on her head like a big brick.
The chest had a brass lock and matching hardware hinges. The green brass was corroded on its edges. She placed it on the bed and unlocked the box with a key that she kept in the bottom of a small wicker purse stowed away inside the bedroom chifforobe, hidden in a locati
on Tom would never look. He wasn’t one to dig through the house anyway, and she was sure he would never try to mess with the locked box.
Inside the chest was her trove of letters, diaries, and handbills from plays, movies, evidence of relationships with men before and after her marriage. Some were erotic letters from the Newcomb College days, personal memoirs of lustful men in different places and times.
Sara grew up hardscrabble in Arkansas. Blytheville was a farm town on the Mississippi River. Her father was a gambler, and he abandoned the family and moved to Louisiana’s Crescent City when she was twelve years old. Her childhood was spent from pillar to post, in and out of rent houses in the Arkansas Delta, never knowing which night the family would be forced to move, or under what kind of dire circumstances. Her father’s departure only made matters worse. The poverty went from bad to horrible. She spent her teen years wondering about his life in the Big Easy, wondering why he left.
One Christmas she received a card from her father with a return address of Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter, the same block where William Faulkner had written Soldiers’ Pay. The card said he was working hard on the docks, and he would send her some money soon. It said she ought to do well in school and listen to her mother and grandmother. Sara was a precocious girl. Throughout her childhood, her only refuge was the county library, and her studious reading made her one of the best pupils to graduate from Blytheville High School despite her rural poverty. She wrote him numerous times, but her father never responded to the letters. This postcard was the last word from him. When she turned seventeen, she applied to Newcomb College and moved south to New Orleans. She attended the school on a full scholarship.
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