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

by Trey Holt

  It’s true. We live our whole lives, almost everything in our culture geared toward our believing that we’re immortal. And this television thing that’s coming out: I’m afraid that it’s going to only make it worse…take our capitalism to a whole new strata. With these images so attractive to the eye, I’m afraid a certain few people will eventually be able to control what we desire…what we think we need.

  Eight years later, his fingers were just starting to become stained yellow from the cigarettes he constantly pinched between them, which Lucky blamed on the first time he was in the insane asylum, even though he himself had the same frequency of the habit. He’d still pace to the window in the attic, open it a little more, shut it a little. Fidget with the lock. Move the fan around three or four times, just right, so it’d blow hot air in a different direction. He was quite a sight there by the window in just his tidy whities, almost as yellow as his fingers now because his mother had become too old to take care of him or his underwear when he was there. Lucky had bought him new ones earlier that summer, taken him to Biggs Men’s Wear. Percy, though, wouldn’t have any of them, saying he liked his old ones better. Two or three times since he had been there, our neighbor Ms. Smithson would call my mother, ask her to keep him from standing in the window in just his underwear. She had found her daughter, Christine, standing in their window, looking at the strangely thin man.

  “Where was I?” he asked one night after my mother left the room.

  “About death or capitalism?” I asked.

  He offered me a cigarette, assured me that if Lucky knew he let me smoke then he’d beat his ass. I pushed a small chest at the end of my bed in front of the door in case my mother came back. I wished that Van could see me now, smoking with Percy. I made sure I was far away from the window so Lucky couldn’t spot me when he came home from shooting craps at the filling station.

  “Either,”he said.“They’re both very important subjects.”

  “We run from death. Capitalism is going to take us over,”I said.

  “And I think they’re extremely interrelated,”he said.“Do you understand why?”

  I didn’t understand half of what he said. I wasn’t sure he was too concerned about that. I shook my head back and forth, acting interested.

  He stood in front of the window only briefly, to jimmy the fan around.“How’s that?”

  “Still hot,”I told him.

  “It’s because we want to believe two basic things,”he said.“Number one: that we belong; and number two: that we go on forever. I think that these two desires may be the base psychic desires, or maybe even needs, of all humans. The ironic thing is that they’re the things that we spend the most time on…and they’re what we already have. They can sell us anything, change the styles on us, tell us something is looking good when it’s not and we have to have it. Do you know why? Because it makes us feel like we belong. From hairstyles to shoes to the kind of food we eat to the book we read, we are prone to do what’s most popular because there’s a strange kind of kinship, or at least feigned kinship, in it. Everything starts because it’s practical. Clothes, cars…everything. Then these things are turned into something‘to have.’So somebody can look like they belong. What we don’t realize is that we already belong. That we were born belonging. The spirit that runs the universe is the same spirit that drives us. You…me…everybody. Then there’s the other part—the one that wants to believe that we won’t die.”

  He made his way to the window again, studied the fan but didn’t move it this time. The buzz from the cigarette was starting to make me shaky. Good shaky.

  “Again, our basic desire comes from the reality that’s already there. We don’t die. Do we leave this world? Yes. Do we leave this plane of existence? Most certainly. Does what we are cease to exist? Hell, no!”

  I held my finger up to my mouth, figuring he might draw my mother up the stairs at any minute. I didn’t want to have to come up with a quick lie as to why the chest was in front of the door. Then explain it to Lucky when he got home.

  “In a metaphysical way even I can’t understand, the spirit which constitutes us returns to that from which it has come—the same as and separate from us. All truth, dear Henry, is dichotomous.”

  I was never certain if it was my eyes that would start to glaze over, or his brain.

  “That’s why it’s so easy to go back to the three things that make up the transpiring of human events. Randomness, a planned nature of things, and basic human frailty. Many people would like to attribute most events to one of these things or another. Lessens our anxiety, I guess. Makes us feel like we’re in control. But no event, even a natural disaster, rises or falls on just one of these. Perhaps two…but most times all three.

  “Take Hood for example. John Bell Hood....”

  Somehow we always got back to Hood. To what happened a square mile around where the house in which we sat was built. Sometimes, especially on a one-light bulb night in this attic, with the only sound the whirring of the window fan, Percy’s voice and an occasional car passing down Cleburne Street, it gave me the creeps. Made the skin on my arms and shoulders feel like it was crawling all over me. I could hear the screams, the desperation, Percy, on his darker nights would describe. The bodies laying one atop another so that, he said, you could have walked a mile from our house and never touch the ground.

  “Hood was a madman. His plans had come direct from General Lee. He liked to think of himself in the same vein as Lee. Kind of an aristocrat. High on the ladder in Southern social circles. They’d both gone to West Point, both ascribed to the theory that the‘leaders’had to acknowledge their superiority to their troops, because they were leaders and had great responsibility.‘A proposition that courage, discipline and will power of peculiar and exclusive sorts had to be possessed by officers leading troops into modern battle. The need to cultivate these qualities during a whole lifetime was the justification for maintaining an exclusive caste of professional officers.’Wintringham, Weapons and Tactics. So, basically, the son of a bitch thought he was better than everybody else.”

  He paced around the room a little, smothered his cigarette butt in the ashtray. Looked out the window into the darkness then checked for more cigarettes in his sock, the only other article of clothing he had on besides his yellow-white underwear. He knocked another one out of the pack and offered one to me. My head still spinning from the last one still smoking in my hand, I declined.

  “He was mad, too. Mad the way any of us is when we don’t really believe we measure up to what other people need us to be. Mad because Sherman had run him and his Army of Tennessee out of Georgia. Mad that he had failed to keep Sherman from takin’and destroyin’Atlanta. Mad that he’d lost a leg and use of an arm earlier in the war. Mad that he’d let them get by him at Spring Hill. Mad because he knew that if somethin’didn’t change, the South was right on the verge of losin’the war. Hell, he was almost as mad as Lucky is that I always got treated better.”

  He laughed at his own joke, waited for me to follow suit. I did, wondering how Lucky’s crapshoot was going, knowing that this more than anything affected how he’d be when he got home.

  “And like I’ve told ya before—all hopped up on that Laudanum…He had‘em here, though. With the help of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who knew the land between Columbia and Brentwood, he had them cut off. With the help of the Harpeth, there was no way they could get around him and to Nashville to join Thomas. But not only did Hood let Stewart’s corps stay in the position they’d taken—the position that Stewart’d ridden back the two miles and asked him about—he let the rest of his troops bed down, satisfied that he’d positioned his troops where Schofield and his men couldn’t pass through.

  “And you know what happened next, don’t ya?” he asked, the friction between match and flint sparking in the air.

  I had drifted off. At least, almost. The kind of sleep that’s not really, when you can still hear someone but their voice is serving more as a sedative than a
nything else. I opened my eyes, which, I am certain, he had never noticed were closed. He was standing full-fledged in front of the window now, underwear, socks and his arms tanned from the upper-arm down from where he walked around town in a tee shirt most days.

  “You know, don’t ya?”

  I knew. He had told me a million times. But I never came far enough above the surface of sleep to speak it. I could feel my eye lids weakening as I drifted off to sleep, Percy still standing in the window, peering outward.

  + + +

  Lucky, the avoidant bastard, tried to sneak back into the funeral home just after George Preston started to run everybody off at quarter till eight. At 7:30, when I had walked out of the room for the hundredth time, I saw his police cruiser pass and then disappear, only to reappear five minutes later, slow in front of Franklin Memorial Chapel, then disappear down West Main Street again. I wouldn’t see Lucky actually materialize until he came from behind the building and tried to make his way through the manicured shrubs down its side and crawl over the railing on the front porch. Unaware that he was being watched or seen by anyone, he was cussing to himself, something he was better at than almost anyone I knew. At least fifty percent of the time I found him alone anywhere, he was accompanied by words of displeasure making their way out his mouth, almost like they had a mind of their own.

  “Goddam George Preston…queer motherfucker,”he mumbled as he got one leg caught in a holly bush and the other suspended on the railing. He was blowing air through pursed lips, as he had become prone to do, trying to suck more in after he had expelled the stale from his lungs. He almost fell. Cussed about that, too. He pulled on his britches leg only to get his leg out of one bush into another, almost fall again. He found his balance, uttered a couple of more curses toward George Preston and the world in general and then secured his hands on the black railing that surrounded the concrete front porch. As he grabbed the bevel-edged iron and began to pull himself over, there was but a brief second that I saw his hands, the only thing about him that looked like Percy. Even though his hands were short, thick and stubby and Percy’s were long and thin, the nicotine stains notwithstanding, they somehow looked much alike.

  The previous time Lucky had returned, it had been clear out front, I assume. He had told me no different. He had just entered through the front door at a time when I had excused myself from the room and the crowd and stood in the hallway outside Celestial Gardens. As had been the case what seemed like every three or four minutes or so, George Preston had just made his way by the back entrance to the Gardens, lamenting in somewhat the same way Lucky would do crawling onto the porch later. Half to himself. Half aloud. To me when he saw I was standing there.

  “Michael used to clean the carpets,”he told me, the voices pushing out of the Gardens behind me, like a loud swarm of bees buzzing.

  “Sir?”

  “Michael…my friend…the boy who helped me here. He used to clean the carpets. He was so good at that. He had worked for a man who owned an antique store in Nashville before he moved in…I mean, came to work here…and the man had shown him how to clean oriental rugs. They had a big inventory of them. He showed him how to mix the solution…everything.”

  I thought he was jobless, homeless…a boy you were helping out.

  “The least he could have done before he left was tell me how he did it.” He glanced over my shoulder into Celestial Gardens like someone in there might be able to tell him how to make the concoction, but seemed to realize quickly that there would be no answers from that room.“But he just left. In the middle of the night of all things. Went back to the antique store owner …I mean, back to work for him without even a thank you, notice…anything. He had worked for him, you know, before he got down on his luck and I helped him out. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

  As it had seemed three or so hours before, George Preston appeared that at any moment his heart might shatter like fine, fragile china dropped from table to hard floor. He pushed at the corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger then pinched the bridge of his nose. Patted his hair, straightened his tie. Looked my tacky-ass suit over. His eyes stopped on my ugly shoes, then his carpet.

  “It’s really a shame,”he said,“that this had to happen.” Shook his head and sighed.

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Michael, himself…or the woman in Celestial Gardens that I, with most of my heart, wanted to forget.

  He felt for his cigarettes, well hidden in the pocket on the inside of his suit coat, almost broke down and smoked one in front of the line growing close enough that I could feel their warmth.

  “Don’t you think?” he asked me.

  I, at the moment, had been wondering if anyone had any idea—that is, besides Sharon, who was at work—of what had happened to her, of the fact that I was behind Franklin High School almost every morning, of the fact we had seen her there, sprawled out by death…by her killer in the parking lot. Concluding that our mornings would have to come to an end. That we would have to take up meeting somewhere else, maybe the river like we had on this morning. I wasn’t sure I could do that. Even though I didn’t know where the exact spot was, and I guessed nobody really did, I knew it was near. And I knew every morning, I’d look for it, find my eyes wandering up and down through the brush, the weeds that raised themselves from the ground and stretched toward the blue of the sky showing through the leaves of the elm and oaks and birch on the bank. For just a moment, I was glad that this couldn’t be blamed on him. Another scapegoat had been found.

  “Young Hall!” said George Preston, turning several people’s heads.

  “Yessir?” I said.

  “I would ask you if you, like I, think this is such a shame, but it’s very obvious your mind is elsewhere.”

  “Yessir,”I answered.“It is. And I do. The whole goddam thing,”I said, my voice sounding much like Lucky’s.

  Mr. Preston’s eyes, somewhat surprised, rose to my face for a moment, then averted to Mrs. Vickers, an older woman who had been in this place every time I had. She smiled, nodded, patted her stiff hair. He gave her a smile that ran the torment from his eyes for a moment. She took her place in the line and turned her attention to the lady in front of her, Mrs. McFadden, wife of Ed McFadden of McFadden Electric.

  “I couldn’t believe he just let James Langford hit him with that gun,”said Mrs. McFadden. The line moved forward a few steps, Mrs. Vickers staying right behind her.“That’s what Ed told me happened. He was down at the auction barn, you know, with Sammy Samuels.”

  “First of all,”said Mrs. Vickers, widowed for many years now,“I can’t believe that people are carrying guns around Franklin. Frank used to have two or three at home he hunted with…but to carry one in your pocket. Doesn’t he work for you all?”

  Mrs. McFadden frowned, nodded her head.

  “And our sheriff didn’t do one thing about it,”said old lady Vickers.

  It was the goddam right thing to do! I wanted to scream. For once, Lucky, the Police Chief, not the sheriff, ma’am, did the right thing. Old lady! Violence only begets more violence, Percy used to tell me. Rarely, it’s a short-term solution in a world fraught with human frailty, a way to protect the innocent. But mostly it just’s makes people meaner…madder.

  “I know,”said Mrs. Mcfadden, now patting her own hair.“You have to wonder if he’s going the way of his brother. You know sometimes it runs in families.”

  “I’ve heard that,”said Mrs. Vickers.

  “So does fuckin’stupidity,”I heard myself utter under my breath. But as is often the case when anger goes unexpressed to the offending party, I felt more embarrassed than anything. I acted like I couldn’t hear them, averted my eyes. Watched George Preston as his eyes moved to his carpet, noticeably dirtier, more worn than when I arrived a little before two. Finally giving in to a couple of impulses he seemed to have been having for hours, he dropped to his knees and began to inspect the carpet with close sight. His hand ran to his coat pocket, this time n
ot stopping to feel for his cigarettes, but fingering one out of the pack and lighting it while on his hands and knees.

  “My God in heaven,”he mumbled,“This carpet will never be the same again.”

  “Are you all right?” Mrs. Vickers called to George Preston.

  George was able to produce a smile again, nod his head.“Yes ma’am,”he said to one of his most frequent patrons,“I’ve just dropped something. Young Hall here is going to help me look for it, aren’t you?” He grabbed me by the britches leg just above the knee and pulled downward until I dropped to the floor alongside him and feigned the search as well.

  + + +

  There seemed to be a continual stream of people, some I knew, some I didn’t, flowing in the front door of the Celestial Gardens and out the back, half of whom it seemed only to enter the line again, wait their turn once more to see this woman I was certain George Preston, by now, was wishing he had never seen. According to him, though, he had not had a choice but to do what my father asked.

  “You put me in a bad position, Dillard,”he told Lucky after he had made his way into the funeral home the first time, just after Mrs. McFadden and Mrs. Vickers were providing their commentary about him.

  “George, what did you want me to do? Put her out in a pine box in the gymnasium we found her in front of?”

  The tears that had been threatening to fall all the day, now finally started their steady treks down George’s cheeks. He made no attempt to pinch them off or hide them this time.

  “No. Nobody should be treated like that,”he said.

  For a moment, Lucky studied George like he might, in fact, be from the moon. Like they both might be so different, one from another, that someone was bound not to be human. He pulled off his hat, the marks on his head looking worse than they had earlier in the day, and laid it on the desk between George and himself. He scoured his face with his open hands, coughed a deep rattle a couple of times. Produced a Lucky. Leaned back in another of George Preston’s fancy chairs and crossed one leg over the other, ankle to knee. Breathed the Lucky in deep and coughed again. George Preston reciprocated with his own cigarette, offered me one, to which Lucky cut a curious eye. I took it and George Preston touched it with his silver lighter.