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

by Trey Holt

  “They don’t look anything alike,”she said.

  “Yeah, Lucky always tells me that. Says that they ain’t nothin’alike in most ways. Looks, personality, brains…He tells me it’s always been that way, since they were little. Sometimes I think Lucky hates him. Sometimes I think Lucky hates everybody.”

  Sometimes I think I hate everybody, I thought, but had the good sense not to say it.

  “He seems nice enough,”she said.

  And shehad been nice enough to leave it at that. The way people do when they don’t know each other well. It was easier, I had learned, if I said it first. Gave people the freedom to them to think what they were thinking.

  “Does he always talk about the kind of stuff he did when we saw him?”

  “Yeah, usually,”I said.“He’s been talking about that kind’a stuff ever since I’ve known him. He’s lived with us off and on for years. He’s filled me in on all of it. But I think it’s worse now. Used to be, he’d just talk about it and wander around. Now he’s doin’some other strange shit—”I paused. She smiled.

  We both laughed. It would have been funnier, I knew, if it weren’t true.

  “People call up here all the time, tell Lucky where he is…what he’s doin’. Lucky then’ll get in his car and go get him. In his regular car, though…this one. Not the squad car because he doesn’t want Percy to ride in the front because how it might look, like he might worry about that, shootin’craps in the fillin’station at night with his car parked right outside. He doesn’t want him ridin’in the back‘cause he doesn’t want more people knowin’about the trouble than already do.”

  “What was he talking about,‘Making things right'?”she asked.

  “He thinks there was some terrible travesty done here,”I told her. I hoped the word had made me seem smart.“In the Civil War. You know, in the Battle of Franklin.”

  She looked at me like she wasn’t quite sure what I was talking about. I was often amazed at how few people really knew much of anything about the battle itself. Even though the people who lived right in the middle of the battlefield, like we did, where so many had fallen. I was different, I assumed, because I had heard it from Percy since I was old enough to hear anything.

  + + +

  As she did when I was delivering papers, Mama would be waiting up on me when I got home. Sitting there in the kitchen, the bottoms of her short legs sticking out of her cotton night gown. Doing nothing except sitting. Nothing on the table to read, no magazine, no book. Not sneaking glances at the television two rooms away. Not knitting. Not smoking. Not drinking. Nothing. Just sitting there in the way that I will always remember her. Leaned slightly forward, her hands clasped together, fingers interlocked. Her legs crossed at the ankles, her sleepy face resting on her hands.

  “Did you have a good time?” she asked me, the door shutting quiet behind me.

  “Yes ma’am,”I told her, trying not to say anymore than I had to.

  “Who did you go with?” she asked.

  “Some girl from the high school.”

  “Does Jean know her?”

  “Probably not,”I said.

  Although it was just Columbia Highway that separated the two sections, Jean lived here, Sharon lived in the“mixed”section, or the section for people that were at least a couple of rungs further down the ladder of poor than we were. Jean had friends that were“good”girls. Sharon didn’t seem like one of those.

  “Your daddy had to work late,”she told me.

  “Yeah, I saw him,”I said.“Workin’late in the floor at the fillin’station,”I mumbled under my breath.

  “Hmm?”

  “Yes ma’am, I saw his car around town,”I said. I started to rumble through the refrigerator, looking for something to eat.

  “You want me to make you somethin’?” my mother asked.

  “No ma’am, I’m fine,”I told her. I came out with a couple of pieces of white bread and a jug of milk. Poured some in a glass.

  “You sure you don’t want me to fix you something? I don’t mind.”

  “No ma’am. I’m fine,”I told her again.

  As I shut the refrigerator and looked back at my mother, my eyes stopped on her face for the first time I could remember in a long time. Her poor, tired face. The face that had Lucky as a husband. Jean as a daughter…a best friend. And then me—no prize. No saint. I knew that. My mind wanted to make its usual turn toward running down Jean, cataloguing in my head how I was I was way better than her—because I didn’t pretend to be something I wasn’t. How that somehow made me different. A rung up the ladder of honesty. Strangely enough, though, all I could see was my mother’s face. Her hands cupped under her chin, her eyes now cast to the same wall she usually stared at before Lucky made his grand entrance and immediate departure for bed.

  “Three-thirty’s going to come early in the morning,”she said.

  “Yes ma’am,”I said, turning my eyes away from her when she looked at me. I reached for the counter with my free hand and propped myself up. Took half a piece of white bread in my mouth. A slug of milk.

  “You just wake up now, don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Now she studied me. Maybe like I had stared at her a few moments before. Looked into me like she was silently inquiring what I had become. This seventeen year old boy...man...whatever the hell I was, who used to be her son.

  “I mean, you used to use an alarm to get up when you do. I’d hear it everyday. You remember, Dillard got it for you.”

  Another bargain-basement purchase, I was sure. Or something he took out of some house he went in, I thought. He told me he had gotten it at the drugstore. Proud of me. Buy me a present. That was still when I could still believe him.“Yes ma’am, I remember.”

  “You just wake up now,”she said, like she was telling me.

  “I’ve been doing it eight fucking years,”I mumbled under my breath as I poured some more milk.“Yes ma’am,”I said.“Time does that, I guess. We get used to almost anything.”

  “Do you think you need to set it for in the morning?” she asked. Standing by this point, she daubed at something on the table with her finger.

  “No ma’am. I’ll wake up,”I told her.

  “I don’t mind getting you up,”she assured me.

  “I appreciate it,”I told her,“but I’ll be fine.

  She stepped to me at the counter and put her arms around my rib cage. Laid her head on my shoulder, then kissed my cheek.

  “I love you,”she said.“Your daddy loves you.”

  “Goodnight,”I told her.

  Chapter Eleven

  “We’re gettin’ready to make a run to get some more shine,”Tully told me when I opened the window. He stood there on the roof above the side porch on our house, smiling.“Van says his ass won’t go with me to pick up some more.”

  I stuck my head out the window a little, looked at Van across the way in his driveway, wagging his head back and forth.

  “He says he ain’t gettin’in no shit like we did the last time. I told him this was a whole different set a’people.” He staggered a little, caught himself before he got near the edge of the roof.”You remember the last time, don’t ya?” he said quietly, like he just realized he’d been talking too loud.

  I leaned out the window enough to see if Lucky’s car was under the carport, which it was. Then I recalled that he had looked in on me just a few minutes before, the best I could judge time coming in and out of sleep like I had. I looked back across the way at Van, who was no longer shaking his head, but now, even in the dim light of the street lamp, had that characteristic smirk on his face.

  “I remember,”I told him.“How the hell could I forget?”

  Images of him trying to negotiate the deal at the back of The Rendevouz, then several men coming from the place, ready to whip our asses because of something he’d said. Van getting in the car with Raymond Collins and locking the doors. He swore he didn’t. But he did. The only thing that save
d us had been that Tully’s trunk was open, where he was going to load the shine he picked up, so he reached in and came out with a tire iron. Scared the bigger of the four men into stopping, the others following suit. Van and Collins unlocked the doors when they believed the coast was clear.

  “This is different,”he told me, mimicking a dance step he’d done earlier.“The place I got this was just some family’s home. Well, I guess it’s family. I mean people live there…you know. Anyway, they said that they’d have another bottle or two ready tonight if I wanted it.I would’a just got it earlier, but they were still cookin’it up. I should’a known that one bottle wouldn’t do us.”

  The way he was using the term“us,”I suspected he believed that Van and I had drunk as much as he had. Although I couldn’t speak for Van, I suspected he was as I had been: feigning as much drinking as drinking himself.

  “Come on,”said Tully.“Are you gonna go or ain’t ya? Don’t be a pussy.”

  “He couldn’t be anything he hadn’t ever had,”said Van from our driveway, where he’d slithered.

  I gave him the finger out the window.

  “Don’t y’all start your shit,”Tully said.“Y’all wouldn’t know what to do without each other. Hell, you’ve lived across the street from each other your whole life.” He stumbled again, this time coming perilously close to the edge of the roof.

  I started to tell him that I knew what I’d do without him: the same thing I believed I’d do without Jean, without Lucky, have one less pain in my ass. But he didn’t give me a chance.

  “In just a minute,”he said,“I’m gonna pull that car out’a that driveway and I’m goin’to Little Texas to pick up some more shine. All I want to know is who, if anybody, is goin’with me?

  Van threw up his arms like he’d been arguing with him about it for the last hour.

  As Tully spun on his heels and began to make his way toward the edge of the roof, where I hoped he would slide down one of the porch columns unscathed, Van, hollered from his own yard,“Get us some good stuff.”

  Tully gave him the“okay”signal as his feet hit the porch and he waited on me to descend the same column he had.

  + + +

  And get us some good stuff we did. So good that Tully couldn’t resist opening one of the bottles before we got a mile from the shack he’d pulled up in front of, entered and then returned from ten minutes later.

  “I’m glad that the one thing Mr. Shafer does for me is give me money,”he said.“Hell, that would’a cost you a week’s work.”

  I started to offer him some money but then thought better of it. Thought Van could give him some of Scoot’s money if need be. Van, who’d never worked more than two or three days in his life.

  Within five minutes after we’d left the bootlegger’s place, Tully pulled to the side of the road and was quiet as a graveyard. Taking drinks from the bottle, passing it to me and making sure I took my slug. Then, back on the road a mile or so, out of nowhere he had started.

  “Hen, you know why they sent me to live with my grandaddy, don’t ya?” he said. He was fumbling between his legs for one of the bottles, steering the car with his knee.

  “Get your hand back on the steering wheel,”I told him.

  He got one hand on the bottle and let his knee drop back to the flat of the seat. He reached up and wiped under his eyes with the back of his sleeve, and I, of all things, felt bad because I had laughed. I didn’t know yet that alcohol could be from God or the devil. Take you way up or way the hell down.

  “‘Cause my whore of a momma run off and left him and my daddy didn’t think he could raise a kid by hisself.”

  All I knew was that Tully had come to live with Mr. Shafer, as we called him, when we were eight or nine years old, if I remembered right. He’d been the skinny little kid down the block with a burr cut that had to go in and change his clothes if he got dirty. Sometimes he’d change clothes four or five times a day. He went to Franklin High School because his family didn’t have the money to send him to the Academy, or at least didn’t want to spend it that way.

  The tears were pouring down his face now. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but I knew from the sounds he was making. Choking like, between his words. He rolled the window down and threw a cigarette out he’d been smoking and reached into the his pocket for another one.

  “Just watch the road…and give me another drink a’that stuff,”I told him, my head feeling strangely lighter, heavier than it ever had from the two drinks he’d given me since we'd takento the road.

  “It just don’t make no goddam sense,”he said.“My mama and daddy can’t raise a kid but some old man like my grandfather can. Does that make one bit‘a fuckin’sense to you?”

  “Uh-uh,”I said, shaking my head.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “No,”I told him.

  “I ain’t seen neither one of‘em in two years.”

  There were a lot of days that this wouldn’t have sounded like such a bad deal to me. As a matter of fact, a few weeks or months or maybe even a year without Lucky didn’t seem too long.

  Nevertheless, the tears that had come quieter before began to spill out of his chest in jolts, choking him again.“Goddam her!” he hollered.

  I wanted to tell him he liked his grandaddy, that living with Mr. Shafer wasn’t the worst thing in the world. But I knew what he’d say. He’d choked out stuff like this before when he was drunk.

  I let a few more seconds go by, sure the car was more air-born than on the road. Sure we were coming off the ground on a few of the hills we topped coming back into Franklin down Lewisburg Pike. I was scared to look at the speedometer, but let my eyes inch to it. We were doing eighty-five.

  “Godammit, Tully, slow your ass down,”I said.

  “My momma left me,”he bawled.

  “I don’t give a shit,”I hollered back.

  “Neither did she,”he said. I could tell he had mashed down harder on the gas.“And then they sent me to live with ole man Shafer.”

  “He’s your grandaddy,”I told him.

  “Now I don’t give a shit,”he said.

  Even though I couldn’t see it in the darkness I knew that we were getting closer to Franklin, to the hairpin curve that I knew brought Lewisburg Pike around and then down a straightaway across the railroad tracks into town. He set both hands on the wheel and looked like he was trying to push his foot through the floor.

  “Godammit, Tully, slow down! You’re gonna kill us!”

  “I might as well be dead!” he hollered.

  “I don’t wanna be dead!” I screamed back.

  In the night I could only see the silhouettes of the trees as they moved in the grey blackness past the car. I could hear only the engine of the Mr. Shafer’s Buick and its tires whining on the road and the suspension of the car groaning and whining as it raised and lowered with the hills. Tully’s muffled chokes had stopped now. I had quit begging. There was just a silence between us. An emptiness.

  Even though the dark blinded me to the curve that would land us in the river, I could see it. I could see it as plain as if it were daytime under a noon sun. A quarter mile. An eighth. A football field away. Next, I could hear the tires screaming, Tully screaming as I knew we had to be right on top of the curve, and myself, screaming louder than either.

  I felt the car as it rose to two wheels and it was almost like we were flying. Like the weight of this world had left us for a few moments. Maybe we were completely off the ground. I don’t know. I only know that we missed the river and ended up with the car on its side in a thicket of brush and bushes, ten feet shy of the bank taking its last severe, downward turn.

  “You all right?’he asked me, almost like nothing had happened.

  After the flight, after the impact, then the final landing, I seriously doubted I was. But reality seemed to indicate otherwise. The coming back to earth had only proved to bump my head on the side window, then topple me into the roof before I landed almost perfectly in my seat again,
my nose pressed strangely against the window like I was peering out at something along the roadside.

  I wanted to curse my answer. Wanted to smack him in his mouth, which was now smiling kind of coyly. But I simply nodded and told him,“Yes.”

  “I think I am, too,”he said.“By damn, would you a’believed that? I bet we flew through the air seventy-five feet.”

  Again, I had the same feelings as I had when he’d posed the last question.“Yeah,”was all I was able to muster.

  “Fuckin’A,”he said.“That was the most amazin’thing I ever saw.”

  I drew in a long breath of air and let it run rough out over my tongue and lips, where he’d hear it.“Me, too,”I said.“It’s wonder it didn’t kill us.”

  “I guess it wasn’t our time,”he chirped, like a drunk bird singing its morning song.

  I turned my eyes to him. Somehow, in the accident, catastrophe, circumstance, whatever you’d call it, he’d captured both bottles in flight. Had one nestled under one arm, the other gripped in the fist that he shook at me.

  “Look what I got!”

  “I see what you got,”I told him.

  “Here, take a drink,”he said,“before we try to crawl out of this motherfucker.” And then without provocation or reason, he began to laugh, as did I.

  “You can’t drink out’a the bottle without it runnin’out’a the side of your mouth,”he said.“Ain’t that funny?”

  I assured him it was and experienced the same when he passed me the bottle.

  “Gimme that bottle back,”he said.“I think I’ll need one more drink before we try to climb out and walk to the road.”

  I passed him back the bottle, the fact that I was sitting sideways, that I had a few minutes before flown seventy-five or so feet in a forty-nine Buick, exaggerating the experience of the world spinning, out of control. Pleasantly out of control.

  + + +

  Alcohol, by its very nature is poison, Percy used to tell me. The body is the temple of the soul, it’s true, he said, but also the temple of the mind. They’re two different things—the soul and the mind—yet the same. Life is strange like that. While intellectual ideas are, by their very nature, strong, and language is what we use to describe those ideas, intellectualism and language are, also by their very nature, incomplete. Flawed, because they are part and parcel of, expressed by, flawed vessels. I am certain this is as true, he would say, as the fact that there are three prime ingredients to our existence and all the actions therein: randomness, a planned nature of things and basic human frailty.