Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  Because I’m lying, I thought.“Because I was afraid,”I told him.

  The next morning found us throwing papers in Lucky’s car. He drove and looked at a sheet Jack Charles had written the names and addresses on, and I threw the papers where he told me. Jack Charles had made quite an exhaustive list. I guess anything was better than having to hand-deliver eighty-four papers the day before. Lucky never mentioned the lie I had told him the evening before; just drove and read, drove and read.

  + + +

  That evening when he arrived home, he simply went straight to his chair in the living room, sat there like usual. Perhaps he was ashamed of what he had done or what people thought. Or maybe of what he was about to do.

  “How was your day, Dillard?” my mother chirped as he passed her by at the stove.

  He grunted, kept moving.

  I moved into the living room and sat in the floor by him. In years to come I would pick up the cues I didn’t then.

  Lucky lit a Lucky and stared into the stucco wall.“We still missed two goddam papers. The Finch’s and the Birdsong’s. Jack Charles called me down at the station and told me that.”

  Truth be known, I suspected, Jack Charles had told him at the craps game at the filling station while they bent over the dice. Truth be known, the other men there probably laughed at the situation, that his son was a dumbass.

  “How’d we miss those two? Didn’t we go over the list, name by name?”

  “Yessir.”

  My mother called from the kitchen, told us that dinner would be ready in five or so minutes. Jean was at a friend’s house. It was just us.

  “You didn’t see that robber again today, did ya?”

  What robber? I thought. I remembered, then told him,“You know, this mornin’, I saw somebody that kind’a looked like him.”

  “Where’d you see‘im?” he said.

  “Somewhere we were this mornin’,”I said.“I think maybe it was near the same spot it was yesterday.”

  I could hear my mother banging and rattling around in the kitchen. I prayed that she would tell us dinner was ready now. This was his way. It was never direct.

  He snuffed out a cigarette in the ashtray by his chair.“Do you know how we got ink on the upholstery in the car?”

  I had to think what car he was talking about. I didn’t answer quick enough.

  “On the roof…by the rearview mirror?”

  “You told me that’s where we ought’a put the rubber bands so we could run the paper through them,”I said. He had told me that the papers would hold better if we rubber-banded them. Told me that Ronnie Langford was a dumbass again…for not playing football, for getting his ass in trouble with his daddy, for thinking about marrying the whore he was. He was loud enough now that I knew Mama could hear him in the next room. I suspected that dinner was ready, but she would wait until he got through with me. Or it would be her, too. In the years previous, she had tried to stop it several times, only to get what I got.

  “I didn’t tell you that. Don’t blame it on me,”said Lucky.

  “Look here—”he’d said,“this is the easiest way to do it. I don’t care what dumbass said.”

  “He don’t even use rubber bands,”I’d told him.“He said that the tri-fold is the‘best damn way.’”

  Lucky, for reasons unbeknownst to me, had been in a good mood that morning. His good moods normally had wide openings for cussing and laughing. At least when we weren’t around my mother and sister.

  “See–,”he’d said,“just run‘em right through here. Roll‘em and then double the rubber band around‘em. They throw better this way, too. I’ve seen how most of‘em throw these things.”

  I didn’t tell him what he’d said.

  “Okay…yessir,”I’d said.

  “What I’m worried about is that goddam ink on the roof…the ceiling. That shit might not ever come off there.”

  He’d used our car, then a thirty-eight Ford, to carry me around that morning, because he hadn’t wanted to his boss, Chief of Police Oscar Garrett, to see him using the car off-duty. Or anyone around town to report having seen him doing it. Oscar Garrett, before he collapsed and died of that heart attack, had been like my father’s second father. As a matter of fact, Lucky talked to him more than talked to his own old man, who lived ten miles away.

  “I didn’t see anything on it this morning when I got out,”I said. Which was true.

  “Was the fuckin’sun shinin’when you got out of the car?” he said.

  I should have known better. These kinds of questions weren’t questions. Simply, bait.

  “It was gettin’to be daylight, yessir,”I answered.

  “So you saw that there wasn’t any goddam ink on the ceilin’of the car?” he said. His voice was starting to tremble.

  “Dillard, you and Henry come on and eat,”she said. She was a fucking professional at play-acting. Making like things weren’t going on.“The potatoes are startin’to get cold.”

  From the living room, I could smell the mashed potatoes—they had been my favorite food as long as I could remember. I could smell the chicken my mother had finished frying ten minutes before. I knew there’d be biscuits. With Jean gone and this meal—Lucky’s favorite—I knew that my mother must have talked to him earlier in the day, after he had become convinced there was ink on his goddam ceiling. After his day had turned shitty and he had decided he was going to come home and take it out on me.

  “We’ll be there in a minute,”he said.“Your son and I are havin’a little disagreement.” He turned his eyes back to me. His speed of speech was more rapid now.“So you didn’t see any goddamned ink on the roof? Are you sayin’I’m a fuckin’liar?”

  “No sir,”I offered. But an answer at this point made no difference. Content of what was said served only as fodder. The only fact that mattered now was that he was the powerful one, both in relationship and stature.

  “I’m not a fucking liar,”he said, coming out of his chair with one push. After the three steps that covered the distance between us, he peered down at me, still seated. I could feel myself grasping the arms of the chair, the roughness of the embroidered pattern under my squeezing fingers. I could feel my fingers, like leaves blowing loose from an autumn tree, releasing the chair I was sitting in as the force pulled me out and then toward him. In a moment quicker than I could even focus my eyes, I was neither on the chair nor the floor, as he had me by some combination of the shoulders and shirt. My neck snapped back hard from the one abrupt shake.

  “I’m not a fucking liar! Do you understand me?”

  “Dillard, put him down,”I heard my mother’s voice say from the other room.“You know it’s not right to harm somebody smaller than you. To take out your anger about who knows what on him just because he’s here. He’s just a boy, Dillard. Just eight…or well, nine. Don’t you understand that? He shouldn’t have to work anyway! You’ve done this to me before! You’ve done it to me for the last time! To him for the last time! This is where it stops! Do you hear me!?

  I could feel the skin on my shoulder ripping as I heard my mother’s voice, still imagined, continue.

  “The only one in this house you don’t treat like this at your whim is Jean. She’s your little angel. I know, though, that if you were married to her or she was a boy then you’d do her the same way.”

  I could hear the sounds as I moved from the chair to the couch, across the coffee table in my way. I could even hear the sound of the open handed blows. Lucky had promised me that he would never hit me with his fist. The discipline would always be open-handed, he had promised at one point.

  + + +

  The following day my mother took a picture of me and Pepper on the front stoop of our house. I’ll never know why she took that goddamned picture. I had been in a fight, she said, when she was showing the picture to someone after a month or so had elapsed. I was like my daddy, I was a scrapper. Took things to heart that people said about me. And I really think she believed it. I really think she
made herself believe that bruise that started above my eye and ran three quarters of the way down my cheek was from a fight I had been in at school. I really do.

  Chapter Seven

  By the time I was seventeen, the Indian was like a plane and the papers were like the fucking missiles launched from it. That route was almost as close to me as my own breathing. I felt like I could have thrown them in my sleep, which a lot of mornings I think I did. I’d had only a couple of complaints about me over the last couple of years—when I hit a door so hard with a paper that it knocked something of the shelf inside. According to Mrs. Barnes, this old widow that lived down Adams, I had knocked an antique“voz” —was how she said it—off the shelf and shattered it into a million pieces. Jack Charles about kicked me in the ass because the paper’s insurance had to pay for the damn thing and according to him, it was likely to make the premium go up.

  I could run the whole route in a little over an hour now. A half an hour at the paper office getting the stuff ready (tri-folding and putting them in separate bags that hung off the Indian) and then five minutes to get to the start of the route. I could have it all done in a little under two hours. The only problems I had now were when it was cold.“Cold as a well digger’s ass”or“Cold as a witch’s titty,”which was one of Lucky’s personal favorites. The hour and a half on the coldest mornings seemed like it took five or six hours.

  Seeing my breath as I left my house and headed to the paper office to start my folding and bagging, I knew it had to be around twenty. Every time I’d breathe out, the air in front of me would turn white and shroud my face for a moment and then disappear as I moved down Adams at thirty. Lucky had warned me at least half a dozen times, the ethical son of a bitch he was, that he’d give me a ticket like anybody else; that he’d not spare me because I was his son. As I turned off Adams and onto Seventh Avenue I tried to remember if he had said anything like that to me since Percy. I couldn’t.

  When I got there in the mornings, it was always the same guys in the paper office. Raymond Collins, a fellow Academy student and asshole, Ralph Thompson, who went to Franklin High School and who I always thought might be a couple of bricks shy of a full load, and Chester Mott, a guy who was between thirty-five and forty and ran the rural route in the morning and delivered every Nashville Banner (the evening paper) in Franklin. All four routes.

  “Good of ya to show up, Hall,”Raymond Collins said as I walked in.“He thinks cause he’s the sheriff’s son that he can get away with fuckin’murder. Oops. That’s a bad word to say around town this mornin’,”he laughed.

  “He’s the Chief of Police, not the sheriff,”I said.“And it isa bad word to say around town this mornin’.”

  Collins sat in the floor, rolling his papers as he always did. He was starting to get a little hunch-backed already. He had one of those bodies that was smooth all over. Not really fat but not a bit of muscle tone either. He had been a tight end on the football team ever since I had played.

  “Your shoulder better, Hall?” he asked.

  I sat in the floor and started tri-folding and bagging, ignoring him. The floor in the paper office was tile and looked as old as the building itself. Probably built around the turn of the century, when it seemed a lot of the stuff up and down Main Street had been built. Halfway between the Great Depression and the south’s first great depression, the Civil War. Thoughts like this always brought to mindmy uncle; I could hear his voice telling me.

  “I don’t know,”I told Collins.

  “Word is you might still play the last coupl’a games of the season,”he said. He laughed a laugh that made me think of Van.

  I didn’t answer him.“Word is”was one of the worst ways I knew to start a sentence. Hell, I didn’t even know if they’d have the games after what the last couple of days had brought around.

  “What the fuck are you doin’over there, Thompson?” Collins hollered.

  Ralph was about finished with his folding and bagging—he was a rubber-band man—and was starting to load his bags on his shoulders. He usually had about five bags like me.

  “I’m gettin’ready to deliver my papers, that’s what,”he said. Ralph’s voice always sounded like it might break at any moment. Into stuttering. Into crying. Into something, I just wasn’t sure what.

  “You got your Dodge out there in the parking lot?” Collins asked.

  “Yeah,”he said.

  Ralph Thompson drove a Dodge just under the age of Methuselah.

  “Is it still runnin’?”

  “Why, yes,”he said.

  “You know,”said Collins, Ralph now standing in the doorway listening to him,“somebody tells me that they saw that goddamned car leaving the high school early yesterday. Where’d you go after you threw your papers?”

  “To school,”said Ralph. Standing there in the doorway, tall and skinny, listening to Raymond the asshole Collins, I knew that he didn’t know he could leave. That he could just give him the finger, a fine“fuck you,”and turn around and walk out.

  “Leave him alone,”I told Collins.

  “Maybe your car was there, too, Hall. Oh, I’m sorry, it wouldn’t have been your car. I forget that you don’t have one. You know, as a matter of fact, I’m sure that I saw that goddam Indian there before anybody else got there.”

  “You didn’t see my bike there,”I told him.

  With Collins’attention off him, Ralph pulled his bags over his shoulder and made his way out the door while he could. Chester Mott sat in the far corner, all business, too old for Collins to bother.

  “Oh, are you a badass now?‘Your‘bike?’“

  “Why don’t you just shut your ass and do your job?” I said.

  “Just jokin’, Hall,”he said.“No big deal. Just tryin’to make a bad situation a little better, that’s all.”

  “It’s nothin’to laugh about,”I told him. If he only knew what she had looked like, had seen the slits in her throat, had known—and I mean, really known—that one human being could do this to another, he wouldn’t be laughing about it.

  “We all know who did it,”he pronounced.“It was that fuckin’nigger at the high school. It don’t take a scientist to figure that one out. Even your old man ought’a be able to get that one. Look right here, it even says that in the goddam Tennessean.”

  He held the paper up and pointed to an article on the lower right side of the front page.“WOMAN FOUND DEAD BEHIND HIGH SCHOOL IN FRANKLIN—NEGRO JAILED.”

  “They even got a coupl’a quotes from you old man in here. He’s quite the wordsmith.”

  As Lucky did in most other areas of my life, and as he almost always did when he was quoted in the paper, I was certain what he said would probably embarrass me.

  “Look here–”Collins said, holding up the article so I could see for myself,“‘Dillard Hall says that he only arrested Jackson Mosby because he had suspicions of his guilt…that no one is guilty until they’re proved that way by a court.’No shit?”

  I looked at neither Collins nor the newspaper he held in front of him. I didn’t want to see what Lucky had said. I didn’t want to look at Raymond Collins, afraid I might try to break his fat, flabby jaw. Neither did I speak to him what Lucky had told me the night before. I was trying to get my shit together and get out of there as fast as I could.

  “Hey—”Collins said as I was starting to make my way toward the door.

  Jack Charles stuck his head out of his office and interrupted him.“A little less talking and more foldin’and baggin’. Don’t want nobody callin’me and tellin’me their paperboy didn’t throw their paper‘cause he got robbed in the alley.” He’d never let me live that one down. Lucky had reported it to him about a week later, after he had cooled off, after my head had started to heal, the blood from the bruise dissipate.

  I held by bags up and shook them at him. He cut his eyes out his office window at Collins like he knew he was a lazy ass. I turned my eyes to Collins for the first time that morning. A mistake.

  “Hey, M
anor and Chester and me are gonna get some beer and go to the Confederate Cemetery Friday night. Some smokes, too. You know, he’s workin’at the store now, since his daddy has had that fuckin’back trouble and his uncle don’t work there as much anymore. He can get all the shit we want. You wanna go? You wanna see if Tully wants to go?”

  Tully was one of the few public schoolboys included in the crowd that could run with these guys. Somehow his personality helped him cross most lines.

  “I’ll ask him,”I told him, the wind from the slightly opened door pushing at my back. Dreading walking out the door and climbing on that motorcycle.“But I can’t go....”

  “Oh yeah,”he said.“I forgot that’s the night you see your hunny on the weekend. Poke that little tight ass. Well, I’m not so sure it’s so tight anymore,”he laughed. That goddam Van laugh.”

  Before I knew what had come over me, I had dropped my bags and hit him at a dead run. Pinned him to the wall outside Jack Charles’s office. Then we had fallen to the floor and I could feel the collar of his shirt ripping in my hands. I could also feel his hands as he struggled to get a hold of my short hair and then grabbed me by the ear. I could feel my knuckles as they began to move themselves into his forehead, once, twice, three times. He kneed me in the stomach and then the groin to get me off him. Then with a shove, he sent me three or four feet away from him. I could taste the blood in my mouth from biting my tongue when we hit the floor. Before he could get up, I was on him again. Mr. Charles grabbed me by the collar and pulled me off.

  “Goddamit, Hall,”he said,“leave him alone! What the hell’s wrong with you? He’s almost twice your size. You ain’t no bigger than your daddy was at your age.” He had gotten his hands around my rib cage and was holding my feet off the floor. Blood dripped from one of Collins’nostrils.

  “Come on, motherfucker,”he told me.“I’ll break your fucking neck. I’ll tear that goddam shoulder out’a the socket again. Let his ass go, Jack. I want all hun’red and thirty pounds of him.”