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

by Trey Holt

  “I know they say it’s necessary, what they’ve done, but I tell you that it has probably opened the door to the devil. I know that most religion thinks the devil tries to get them to do what is against that religion, like drink or smoke or be in general a bad person, but....”

  Sometimes now he seemed unable to articulate his own ideas as he had even a few months before. As the treatments had increased and then plateaued at three a week, his faculties had seemed to consistently diminish until they finally came to resting place of stillness like the falling snow.

  “I mean, this is power to destroy the world. Once that’s been used, you can’t ever go back from it. We’ll never know how many people were killed. Maimed. Their and their families’lives altered in some way that can’t be changed. People can’t be unbombed.”

  Lucky had told him,“Well, goddam, what would he think we could do? Just keep sending our boys one after another for them to come home in a box? I think enough a’that had been done. Too many come home like Ronnie Langford or Fred Burkitt…or didn’t even come home.”

  In Franklin, Tennessee, these names had become almost synonymous with World War II by the time the man from Independence, Missouri decided to put an end to it fairly succinctly. The mere mention of their names explained what can happen to men who go to war, their families.

  A few months before, I am certain Percy would have been absolutely convinced it had something to do with him, somehow had missed its intended target. Now though, the medicine, the electricity, something, had leveled his suspicion, returned him to just a mild level of contempt of the way things were handled.

  “Your daddy has always been a man who believed in violence,”he told me.“That’s primarily why men have run the world. Force others do what they want them to do. Force them like he’s forced me to stay in this place. It could have been worse, I guess. They could have kept up with the three-a-week shockings, but now they’re down to one. The food’s not bad…but they just don’t have much of a library. I think they want to limit our ideas. At least I do get a newspaper.”

  He picked his newspaper up off the scarred nightstand and rifled through the pages until he found what he wanted to show me.“You know they dropped those two bombs last week, don’t you? The last one was dropped a few days ago. Looks like the Japs are about ready to surrender.”

  The first one, on August 6th, had been mentioned on the television set and then again when Lucky had said at dinner that he thought it would be likely to end the war. That men make hard decisions sometimes, that’s what makes them men. The second had come some three days later, the less deadly, killing only thirty-nine thousand, maiming and injuring twenty-five thousand.

  “I’m just not sure what else could be done,”he said sadly, I imagined paralleling this situation with his own.“I’m not saying that there’s not a place for force, I just think that it has to be used with the utmost discretion. It’s the easiest, quickest solution always, with the worst eventual consequences. As I was sayin’earlier, though, we’re fooled into believing we can solve problems with it. It just makes them disappear temporarily, not go away. It’s just further proof of Walter’s presence in the world. I haven’t mentioned him much lately, but he’s here. Always here.”

  Except for comments like that, Percy appeared almost as sane as the next person. Of course, I really had nothing to compare him to except the way he had been most of my life, with each month progressively worsening, it seemed. Precisely the reason, Lucky had told me, that I should talk to him no more than I had to. Usually, his trips had been clandestine enough that I did not ask to go, that is, until Percy starting ringing through consistently on the party line, asking for Lucky to get him released and bring me. Finally, he had consented to one to keep from having to consider the other.

  As the snow continued to cover the earth along Cleburne Street, I guessed we hadn’t been there in two or three weeks. When he had first come up missing, it had been easier to remember.This was the first night in a long while his empty bed had reminded me of his absence. Of course, I had also been reminded by a strange little boy across and down the street called Tully, who had come to live with his grandfather due to what Lucky described as his mother’s“bad habits.”

  Earlier in the evening, just before the catastrophe, he and Mr. Shafer and Van and Scoot had come to our driveway to help us shovel in case Lucky had to get out.”Hey,”he said as we took a break from shoveling,“you know they’re just lettin’us shovel to think we’re doin’somethin’.”

  “Lucky says if you never let it pile up, then it’s not so easy for the other to freeze on top of it.”

  “Who?” he said.

  “Lucky. My Daddy.”

  “Oh,”he responded, seeming to understand.

  “He might have to get out or somethin’, too,”I said.“He’s a policeman.”

  “Didn’t another man live here for awhile?” Tully had asked, innocently.

  “My uncle,”I told him.

  “He wasn’t right, was he?” he asked.

  “What’d you mean?”

  “Well, I guess I mean he was umh…crazy.”

  “He’d say we all are in some way or another.”

  “Okay, boys, your turn again,”said Scoot as Tully and Mr. Shafer began the short walk home.

  Van had done more leaning on his shovel than working. He gladly handed it to me.”Raymond Collins said he was gonna come help us after while. I saw him when we were sleddin’earlier.”

  A strange custom though it was, it was one none the less. People came to help shovel. To share the bottle while they did so.

  “Can I have some, Daddy?” Van asked Scoot as he took a slug.

  “No,”he answered.“And don’t tell your mother that I did either.”

  Evelyn was the less easy-going of the two sisters, my mother and she.

  Van nodded.

  “And why don’t you shovel some more? Lucky and I are old, tired men.”

  “I’m tired, too,”he said.“I’ve been sleddin’all evenin’.”

  “You don’t know what tired is, boy,”Lucky said as he rested beside us, leaned on a porch pillar. Still breathing normal.

  Van laughed. Wouldn’t argue with Lucky.

  “Now you come right back in a little while,”I heard my mother’s voice call from behind me.“I don’t want you out more than a few minutes.”

  So appeared the Princess. I could catch the death of pneumonia and nobody would give a shit. But not her. Don’t stay out too long. She had on what looked to be four coats and two hats, as she stood smiling behind us. I turned and glanced at her and huffed.

  “Daddy, do you want me to shovel?” she asked.

  “No, sweetheart,”he answered.“We’re fine…getting it done fine. Why don’t you go back in and help your mother. I’m sure she could use your help inside.”

  She said ,“But I wanna stay,”like she was five, not ten.

  Lucky nodded and turned away as he squinted at Scoot. A woman’s presence, much less a girl, in this group would put an end to the conversation and the drinking. Both of which, I had grown to assume, were the real purpose behind a lot of things men do.

  “Henry,”he said,“why don’t y’all go to the end of the drive? Work from there back toward here. You and Jean. We’ll work toward you.”

  I nodded at Lucky’s crazy solution that sacrificed me, not him. Then motioned for Van to come with me, which he gladly did so he could be away from the adults. I heard them begin to laugh, figured the bottle had come out again.

  “Here,”Van told her,“let me show you how to use this thing.” He took the shovel and began shoveling to show her how it was done correctly. He flung snow twenty feet down the street, then at Raymond Collins and Paul Chester, Jr. when they were within sight. They gathered the deepening snow in their hands and threw it back at Van, missing him and hitting me and Jean.

  “Watch out,”I told them, my words mostly focused at Raymond Collins.

  “Oh, he’s tough,”Ray
mond said.“Watch him, Paul.”

  “I’m tough as I need to be,”I said,“‘specially with this shovel in my hands.”

  Jean hit me in the arm, told me to hush.

  “Here, I’m showin’ ‘em how it’s done,”said Van. He scooped a couple of more shovelfuls of snow, tossed it at Collins’and Chester’s feet.

  “Watch out,”said Paul Chester.“I don’t wanna have to go home and change clothes again. I already had to once. I got so wet and cold sleddin’that I thought I was gonna freeze.”

  Van threatened to throw another scoop at him. He scowled and they both laughed.

  “I still wanna try to shovel,”whined Jean.“Daddy said I could shovel. That’s what he said.”

  “I don’t remember him sayin’anything like that,”I argued.“Do you, Van?”

  “Let her shovel if she wants to. She’ll be tired after one or two swings,”he said as he wielded the shovel wildly. It looked like he was just scattering more snow than he was actually moving.

  “Here,”said Ray Collins,“let me show you how it’s done.” He snatched the shovel I had been leaning on out of my hand.“Look here, Jeannie, this is how it’s done. Right here.” He thrust the shovel into the snow, the pavement underneath screaming, then threw the snow toward the middle of the street.

  “Y’all throw the snow in the ditch,”Lucky yelled.“Not in the street.”

  “Yessir,”Van responded, then made a face barely visible under the streetlight.

  He and Ray Collins returned to their shoveling, seeing how much they could move with each attempt. Van, almost as scrawny, or maybe lanky, as he’d still be at seventeen. And Raymond Collins just as surly as he’d be later. Throw the snow. Throw the snow. Throw the goddam snow.

  By the time they were seven or eight feet up the driveway, they were both breathing like switch

  engines, their breath making great clouds of moisture as they blew out.

  “Here,”said Ray Collins.“It’s y’all’s turn.” They threw the shovels at Paul Chester and me, mine rattling at my feet in a space I’d begun clearing away with my boot. Paul Chester picked his up and began to shovel where they’d stopped. Van and Ray Collins sat down by the side porch on the house, leaned against the bottom step. Paul Chester and I began to shovel.

  “Your daddy got the store open?” Lucky hollered to Paul.

  “No sir,”he answered.“He tried to open it this mornin’, but then it just kept gettin’worse.”

  Lucky nodded. Offered Scoot a cigarette and a slug on the bottle. He took only the latter. Jean made her way from the end of the driveway, where she’d been standing, watching some of the many Pitts children attempting to sled. Paul Chester and I shoveled until we were out of breath.

  “I think we’ll just stand back and let y’all finish,”said Scoot.“You’re not gonna leave anything for anybody else when they come.”

  “Who else is comin’, Daddy?” Jean whined.

  “I don’t know, hunny. Whoever wants to, I guess.”

  “I want to shovel something before we get finished,”said Jean.“I already told you that.”

  “You already had a chance and didn’t take it,”I told her.

  “You’re just afraid she’ll out-shovel you,”said Raymond Collins.

  “Is that what you’re afraid of?” Van asked.

  I shoveled harder, breathed hard enough that my chest burned. Threw my shovel at Collins’feet when I thought myself done. Chester threw his to Van.

  “I ain’t ready yet,”said Ray Collins.

  “I’ll go,”said Van, watching Scoot watch him.“Give me the damn shovel,”he muttered under his breath.

  “Here,”said Collins, moving off the step.“I’ll go.”

  As it is in many such moments, I’ll always be uncertain what exactly happened next. It was my recollection then that Van took the few steps between us and grabbed at the shovel in my hand. Perhaps took it from me. Or perhaps it was Raymond Collins who took the shovel from my hand and Paul Chester had given his to Van. Or maybe it was even that Jean tried to take one of them or actually took one of them out of our hand. No matter. It would be Ray Collins and myself who ended up with the shovels in our hands. And Ray Collins and myself who began to attempt to shovel the same four or five square-foot area, our shovels actually throwing sparks a few times as they collided. And it would be Van and Paul Chester who sat on the step of the side porch that they had cleared off with their hands, hollering as we attempted to out-dig one another.

  And it would be Jean who stood between us and them, watching, to see if her brother could outdo the boy who lived up the street who had always been an asshole, the same one I had fought when he had pushed her into the mud one time,“accidentally.” Got my ass whipped by. Lucky and Scoot hollered with Van and Paul, their bottle having rendered them painless and louder.

  As I am not sure how the shovels arrived at their own destination in our hands, neither can I say that I know how the swing came. It did not then, nor does it now make sense to me how a shovel being moved in the manner it was can somehow rise above the half-circular motion to make a downward descent. Perhaps that was how hard we were shoveling. Or perhaps none of this happened the way I remember. I only know for certain that when Jean lay bloody in the snow, a gash somewhere between the temple and the crown of her head, Ray Collins and I stood there, shovels in our hands, certain that the blow had come from the other’s hands.

  As Lucky fell twice in the unshoveled portion of the driveway and Scoot paused uncertain whether to help him or continue to make his way toward Jean, I was of all things aware of how quiet the night had grown so rapidly: strangely stiller than I had ever known after she had grown quiet with a grunt and collapsed.

  Although I am sure Lucky had seen things much worse in the years he had put in on the police force, it seemed as though this had captured his breath, stolen his sense. He began to scream my mother’s name over and over and over. I half-expected Jean to come out with my mother when the door on the side porch opened and panic descended over her face. But Jean lay in front of and under me now, as I had dropped my shovel and ascended the three steps to the porch where I watched over the shoulders of those who attended to her. The one river of blood began to break and form tiny streams, disappearing into the snow beginning to cover the areas cleared a few moments before.

  + + +

  I could hear exactly what he’d say after he had some whiskey in him: that arrogance gives way to mistakes, makes us believe that we’re somehow invincible and that how our actions affect the things around us is just a consequence of what was done. In other words, some people believe how what they do affects other people is just because the other people were in the way. Wrong place at the wrong time. I would wonder later if he still believed that, if things were still that simple.

  What he’d say, I thought of Raymond Collins. The thoughts gathered themselves in my head like Lucky and Scoot and Van had gathered Jean and taken her in the house and laid her in that bedroom that would become hers forever now. And I knew this: what I thought of Raymond Collins, Lucky was likely to think of me. I would sit on the bottom step of the attic stairs and listen the majority of the rest of night as Lucky and my mother made their way in and out of the room where Dr. Guppy now sat with Jean.

  “How bad is it, John?” had been the first words I remember anyone speaking after he arrived.

  “She’s still bleedin’pretty good,”he said.“But I’m not as worried about the bleedin’as I am the actual injury to her head. She went right out, right? Lost consciousness almost immediately.”

  As I tried to formulate my own answer to his question, I realized that the few moments of the actual event had now become like the moments preceding it: a mass of tangled movements, one running into the next so that none could be identified alone.

  “Yes,”said my mother.“That’s what you told me when I came outside. She was already out by then…just laying there. You said that she just went straight down.”

  �
�I couldn’t tell,”he said. All I know is by the time we got to her she was completely out.”

  From the stairs where I listened, my father’s voice sounded like it might crack and break as I had seen ice do when it hung off the side of the house. Neither he nor my mother had left the room where Jean lay since they had brought her in. In turn, I had not entered it. That I could recall, neither of them had spoken a word to me since the event transpired.

  “Head injuries are strange things,”Dr. Guppy said,“they’re just hard to predict. The ones you think will be utterly serious can turn out to be very minor…and ones you think aren’t going to be bad can turn out to be extremely serious.”

  “Do you think we ought to try to take her to Nashville? Would she be better off th—ere?” my mother asked, her voice cracking.

  “No, Mary, I think she’s just as well off here…really. To be completely honest with you, there’s not a lot more we can do except wait and see how she responds to what’s been done.”

  When he had first arrived, as Lucky and my mother still hovered over her bed and Scoot watched the foot, Dr. Guppy had given her two shots. Lucky and my mother had agreed to them, seemed as though they would have agreed to anything at the time.

  “We ought to know something by the time the sun rises,”said Johnny Guppy.

  “What can happen?” Lucky asked him, after my mother had walked by me as if I weren’t there.“We’ve known each other a long time. Went to school together…what school I went to. I’m dependin’on ya to give it to me honest. I’d rather you lay it out.”

  There was stillness where Lucky’s words had been, silence that swallowed them. I heard my mother moving around in their bedroom. Wondered if she could hear what they were saying…if Scoot and Van were still in our house. If they weren’t, when they’d be back, bringing Evelyn with them. Van hadn’t spoken to me after the incident either, just looked at me standing up there on the porch and mouthed“Oh shit”like he knew as well as I what I had done. Raymond Collins had only said,“I knew somebody was gonna get hurt the way you were swingin’that shovel. You should’a just let me do it.”