by Tom Epperson
Point Dume was where Darla told me all about Darla.
She grew up in a speck-like town on the prairie called Nebraska City, Nebraska. Her father was the postmaster. One winter when she was twelve there was a terrible blizzard and no one could get out of the house for days. Her father just sat there drinking moonshine out of a mason jar and getting more and more worried because he couldn’t get the mail out to people and he felt like he was letting everybody down. Darla said she and her father were sitting at the kitchen table and her mother was standing at the stove cooking breakfast and her mother told her father to quit feeling sorry for himself. Her father didn’t say a word, just got up and started walking toward her mother and then Darla saw a gun in his hand and he shot her mother in the back of the head. Then he turned and looked at Darla.
The wind was howling outside and snow was blowing past the windows and she could see in her father’s eyes that he was about to kill her. She jumped up and ran in the bathroom and locked the door. He started beating on the door then throwing his weight up against it, and she tried to get the window open but it was jammed shut then he burst into the room.
She got in the bathtub like it was some kind of protection and tried to squeeze herself up into a little ball as he walked over and looked down at her. “No, Daddy, don’t!” she said, and he smiled at her and said: “Aw, honey, I wouldn’t never hurt you, I’m your daddy,” and then he shot himself in the side of the head.
She was sent to live with her uncle Gideon. He lived on a farm out in the middle of nothing. He and his wife didn’t have any children. She was an invalid and seldom left their bedroom.
Darla had to do all the cooking and cleaning like the stepchild in a fairy tale. She had to bring in water from the well and feed the chickens and once she even had to help Uncle Gideon slaughter a hog; she held on tight to the hog’s hind legs so it wouldn’t run off while Gideon beat it in the head with a sledge hammer.
One day Darla was sitting in the outhouse when she became aware that Gideon was spying on her through a crack in the door.
As the weeks went on it seemed like every time she looked around she’d find her uncle’s eyes on her. She was only twelve but she’d developed early and she looked sixteen, and she knew enough about the facts of life to know what was on Gideon’s mind.
She was out in the barn gathering eggs on a day in early spring when Gideon came in. He came up behind her and put his hand on her bottom and started rubbing and squeezing it. She told him to stop and he said: “I’m just giving you what you been wanting, you little whoremongering bitch.”
She tried to get away but he chased her around the barn, giggling all the while like they were two kids playing tag. She started taking eggs out of her basket and throwing them at him, and he dodged and giggled till one hit him in the forehead. Then his face turned dark with anger as he wiped off the dripping mess, and she made a break for the ladder that led up to the hay loft. She nearly made it all the way up but then he grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her down, then, still holding on to the one ankle, he dragged her over to a pile of hay. He yanked her dress up and her drawers down and climbed on top of her. She said the sounds he made while he raped her reminded her of how the hog sounded when it was being killed.
When Gideon finished he became enraged and slapped her face again and again. He said it was her fault he’d fallen into sin and it was her fault his brother had killed himself; he was sure Darla had tried to tempt his brother into doing what Gideon had just done and he had to kill himself to keep from doing it. As he got up and buttoned his britches he told her not to tell anybody what had happened or else he’d throw her down the well then say she’d killed herself because she couldn’t live with all the lies she’d been telling.
She ran away, but Gideon called the sheriff on her and he caught her and she was back on Gideon’s farm in less than a day.
Gideon told her if she was going to act like some kind of sorry no-account dog that wouldn’t stay in the yard unless it was tied up then that was how he was going to have to treat her. He chained her to the stove. He brought her food and water twice a day, and the only time he let her loose was to go to the outhouse. He’d go with her and stand in the door to make sure she didn’t run off.
Darla said that after about a week she wrapped the chain around her neck and tried to strangle herself, but it hurt too bad so she gave up.
Finally one night her aunt Bess crept out of the bedroom, wearing a flowing white nightgown that made her look like a ghost. She had a key. Darla could hear Gideon snoring as Bess unlocked the padlock. She whispered: “Now you just run, honey, you run away fast as you can. I’d go with you if I could.” So Darla snuck out of the house and ran down the road and the sheriff didn’t catch her this time.
She walked for two days, hiding whenever a car went past, till she happened upon a hobo jungle near a railroad yard. Three hoboes were cooking some stew and Darla was starving and they fed her. She stayed with them a few days and they were really nice to her. Darla said it was kind of like a Shirley Temple movie, three loveable tramps adopting a cute little runaway girl; one of the tramps even looked and talked like Wallace Beery, but then they all got liquored up one night and tore off her clothes and took turns with her.
So she ran off again. She hitchhiked. She tried to accept rides only with older husband-and-wife-looking couples who seemed unlikely to attack her. When asked what her story was, it never occurred to her to tell the truth; she would just say she was on her way home after visiting relatives. Her rides would often feed her and sometimes give her a buck or two.
Darla drifted eastward across the country; her only goal was to put as much distance as possible between herself and Nebraska. That summer she got caught in a thunderstorm out on a road in Indiana. She’d always been terrified of lightning and so she jumped in the first car that stopped.
It was a Model A Ford driven by a young Army lieutenant. Within ten minutes his hand was on her knee and headed north. She sunk her teeth in his arm and he yelled and she opened the door and flung herself out.
She bounced and tumbled in the rain till she came to a stop with her left arm sticking out at a crazy angle. The lieutenant’s car slowed down a minute then sped away.
Darla found herself just outside the city limits of Elwood, Indiana. She walked into town, her broken arm hanging. Lightning struck a tree in front of her and a big limb fell down on the ground. She saw a sign in front of a house that said: Woodrow Ames, M.D.
Dr. Ames turned out to be a tall silver-haired old man who set her arm with gentleness and skill. He complimented Darla for not crying or crying out. He was nearly finished when she started getting bad stomach pains then blood came pouring out from between her legs. He called to his wife to come and help, and the Ameses and Darla were all astonished when a tiny half-formed baby plopped on the floor like a dead fish.
Darla hadn’t known that her uncle Gideon or one of the tramps had gotten her pregnant. She began to cry and she told them everything. She begged them not to send her back to Uncle Gideon, and Dr. Ames said don’t worry, the only things that man deserved were a vigorous horsewhipping and a long prison term.
Dr. Ames and his wife had a daughter but she had grown up and had her own children and moved away, and now they were very lonely. They looked on Darla as a gift from God. They moved her into their daughter’s old bedroom. They felt bad about what had been done to her and they couldn’t do enough for her. They bought her new clothes and shoes and ribbons for her yellow hair and whatever kind of bright gewgaw a girl twelve going on thirteen might desire. They told everyone in Elwood Darla was the daughter of a distant relative who had died. They said they would like to adopt her legally if it was all right with her and she said yes.
On Sundays, they took her to church. She had a fine singing voice and joined the youth choir.
In September, she enrolled in school. She was in the eighth grade. She felt much older than her classmates and didn’t make any real fri
ends. But she found herself popular because she was so pretty and everyone was eager to sign the cast on her nearly mended arm, and she liked school and studied hard and made good grades.
In December, there was a lynching.
An old white woman named Bathsheba Butler had been found in her house robbed, raped, and stabbed and hacked to death with a pair of gardening shears. Earlier that same day, a colored man named Beau Jack had done some yard work at her house, and he’d been seen trimming some bushes with those very same shears.
Beau Jack was arrested and put in the local jail. That evening a mob formed and took him from the jail and out to the edge of town. They stood him in the back of a pickup truck under an oak tree with a big horizontal limb; Darla found out it wasn’t the first lynching that had happened there.
It seemed like the whole town turned out, and people were acting excited and happy, like it was the Fourth of July and they were waiting for the fireworks. Near the outskirts of the crowd Darla saw the mayor talking to the police chief; they were both laughing and smoking cigarettes. Some kids were playing Pop the Whip.
Crisp brown leaves covered the ground. It was very cold, and it was sleeting, and the sleet made a frying sound on the dead leaves.
The scene was lit up by the headlights of several cars. Beau Jack had his hands tied behind his back. He looked to be about thirty. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and well-muscled. He was naked. He was bleeding from many places. He’d been whipped and beaten, and his right ear and his private parts had been cut off.
He was shaking all over, whether from the cold or fear or the shock of his wounds Darla couldn’t say, but his face as he looked out over the crowd was completely blank. Somebody said: “Dumb nigger don’t even know what’s happening to him,” but Darla understood the blankness.
They put the rope over his neck, and somebody started up the truck. But there had been a lot of rain lately, and the truck only moved a foot or two before it got stuck in the soft ground. Beau Jack stumbled a little but regained his balance. Good natured jeers came from the crowd as they struggled to get the truck moving. The tires spun in the mud. A big fat guy named Donnie Collins unwisely got right behind one of the tires and was splattered head to toe with mud, which caused a lot of laughter. Finally the truck got traction and lurched away, and Beau Jack swung and jerked at the end of the rope for several minutes till he was still. Then people got out their cameras and posed in front of the dangling corpse.
Darla was there with Dr. and Mrs. Ames. Bathsheba Butler had been his patient and the life-long friend of both of them. Mrs. Ames couldn’t bear to watch, she hid her face in her husband’s chest, while Dr. Ames looked grim but he never turned away.
Darla told me she didn’t care what that poor coon had done, he didn’t deserve what had been done to him, at the very least he should have got a fair trial. And the whole town had just stood there and watched and nobody had said a thing, including her beloved Dr. Ames. And the people had brought out their own children to see the torture and killing of Beau Jack, and it was evil, purely evil, out there on the edge of town, evil in the leaves and evil in the sleet and evil in the headlights and the stark shadows and evil even in Darla, she had stood there with the rest and hadn’t said a word, it didn’t matter she was only thirteen she should have said something.
At church that Sunday, she looked around at everybody, and she’d seen many of them at the lynching and if they’d been a bunch of naked wailing witches leaping around a fire at midnight she would’ve had more respect for them, it just made her sick them singing hymns about going to heaven and acting like they were so godly and so good.
She started having bad dreams about her and Beau Jack, although sometimes her eyes were open so they couldn’t be dreams: Beau Jack would be crouching in the bathtub as her father stood over him with a gun, Darla would be standing naked on the truck with the rope around her neck and the tires churning the mud and throwing it up into the headlights, she would be holding on to Beau Jack’s legs as Uncle Gideon beat him in the head with a hammer, and she and Beau Jack would be fleeing the hobo jungle, running away together into an eternal night.
Elwood, Indiana had seemed like a haven to her at first, but now it seemed a dark place, full of ghosts and sorrow. It seemed like Nebraska all over again, a place she needed to leave.
It was the Ameses’ habit every Sunday after church to go to the Totempole Grill for a fried chicken and waffles dinner. A few weeks after the lynching they were there when Darla overheard the waitress talking to a man at the next table; he said he was a traveling salesman for Morrill Meat and was just passing through. When he got up to leave, she excused herself, saying she needed to go to the restroom, but she followed the man outside. She asked him if he could give her a ride to the next town, and he looked her up and down and grinned and said you bet, hop in, and Darla never saw Elwood or the Ameses again.
For the next several years she wandered around the middle part of the country, making it a rule never to return to a place once she’d left. By the time she was fourteen she looked twenty; she lived her life as an adult, and thought of herself as one too. She had little trouble getting a job as a waitress at one greasy spoon or another. Sometimes when she left a job she’d clean out the cash register on her way out; she said she’d steal a hot stove in those days. She got caught by the law once, but she slept with the sheriff and he let her go.
She turned eighteen in Aurora, Illinois. One day she was at a picture show, watching Hills of Peril, a Buck Jones western. She was nearly the only person there. After the movie was over she started talking with the owner; the place was named the Dream Theater, and she asked him why it was called that. He told her it was because he thought “dream” was the most beautiful word in the English language.
Darla started going to the theater at least once a week, and she found herself looking forward as much to seeing the owner as the picture. His name was Goldsborough Bruff. He was forty-eight. He got around on crutches, because one of his legs was missing just below the hip. He had dark wavy hair with gray streaks in it.
One night he told her his ticket girl had just quit and did she want the job? And so Darla gave up waitressing and began working in the Dream Theater.
It was an old drafty building that leaked in the rain and there never seemed to be very many customers but she loved it there. She sold tickets and candy and soda pops and popcorn and helped Mr. Bruff change the titles on the bright marquee and put his messy office in order. She would come in even on her days off to help him out.
Bruff didn’t have a wife or any close relatives. He told her he had grown up in a wealthy family but his father had lost everything in the Panic of ’93. When the Spanish-American War started he joined the Army, and was very disappointed that the fighting was over before he could get into it. But eventually his outfit got shipped to the Philippines to fight the rebels there. One day a donkey wandered into their camp. He and some other soldiers went over to take a look at it. The donkey was carrying some packs on its back, and Bruff saw smoke curling up out of one of the packs an instant before the donkey exploded. Several soldiers were killed, and a dozen or so were wounded; Bruff woke up without a leg.
Darla told him a little of what had happened to her, and she saw tears welling up in his eyes as he listened, and she thought she had never known anyone so kind.
She’d been working there about three months and she was up in the projection booth with Bruff helping him get the picture ready for the Saturday matinee, when she sensed that he wanted to kiss her. She said it’s okay, Mr. Bruff, go ahead, and he did so. He said he was in love with her and wanted to take care of her forever and for her to be his wife but there was something she needed to know: his war wounds had left him unable to father children. She said the last thing she wanted was to have a bunch of bratty kids and as far as what went along with having children she’d already had more than enough of that and could live without it just fine and she loved him too and the answer was yes.
Darla said they were very happy for a while as they planned their wedding and honeymoon, but then he started acting sad and glum. He said she was a beautiful young girl with her whole life ahead of her, and it was selfish of him to allow her to join up her life with that of an aging cripple running some falling-apart picture show that barely made a dime. She said she was old enough to know her own mind and they loved each other and that’s what counted and she didn’t want to hear anything more about it.
One day she came in for work and didn’t find Bruff in his office, then went up to the projection booth and that was empty too. But then she looked down and saw Bruff sitting in one of the seats, right square in the middle of the big empty theater, facing the curtained screen.
She went downstairs. Bruff’s crutches were propped up on the seat beside him. His eyes were closed and his chin was on his chest. She thought he was asleep, but then touched his shoulder and knew he was dead.
The doctor said it must have been a heart attack, but Darla wasn’t so sure. She said that Bruff was still often in terrible pain because of his war injuries, and he’d take such great quantities of morphine he’d be so woozy he could barely keep his eyes open. She thought that maybe he’d accidentally taken too much.
Darla discovered that Bruff before he died had changed his will and left her everything—which basically meant his little house and the Dream Theater. She knew she couldn’t stay in Aurora with him gone, so she sold the theater and the house, and after the bank loans were paid off, she was left with a little over 3500 dollars.
Around that time she happened to read an article about Los Angeles in a magazine. The article’s name was “The Newest City in the World.” That sounded good to her, and so she booked a seat on the Santa Fe Chief.
“How old are you, Danny?” asked Darla.