Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee
Page 29
I heard my mother weeping from her bedroom, on the party line with Evelyn, I figured. Or perhaps just allowing the tears of fear and desire of a few moments back to overtake her alone.
“There are, I imagine, three things that could happen,”Dr. Guppy spoke finally.“The first,that she comes to in a little while and has had nothing worse than a concussion.” He cleared his throat, once then twice.“The second is, God forbid, she stay unconscious for an undetermined amount of time. That’s called a coma. Research aside, they still don’t know what causes them or brings people out of them.” Throat cleared again.“Third, she could come to and have some kind of damage, either from the blow itself or the blood loss. Was her pulse and her breathin’steady?”
“I never checked,”said Lucky.“I like to not got to her. Fell down in the damn snow t....”
At the end of his words, it sounded like he was choking, The times I had seen or heard him employ this method of crying had been few and far between, but I knew the sound. Choking the pain down into his throat and chest, where the smoke swirled when he drew in his Lucky’s.
Through the back door and across the porch came Evelyn, my mother’s sister. She frowned a smile at me and headed through the hall to my mother. Lucky nodded at her, as did Dr. Guppy. I allowed my eyes to fix on the doorway, the one through which Percy had walked on the morning that Lucky“talked him into”going to the place where he’d been ever since, at Dr. Guppy’s suggestion. As the night passed, my mother and Evelyn came and went from the room to which they had retreated into the room from where Jean lay and Lucky and Johnny Guppy held vigil. I sat at the bottom of the steps, knowing that the next morning I would still have to carry my papers, throw them to the people who bought and paid for them. Do it on foot in galoshes, that neither Jack Charles nor Lucky would have it any other way. As Lucky and my mother passed me sitting at the bottom of the stairs, they would reach out and touch my head now, as if to say that it was still all right…that it did not have a three-inch gash in it. As if they felt sorry for me for killing my sister.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jean’s funeral, in its own way, was similar to the“viewing”they did for Rosa Mary: people filing by and viewing the body, trying to discern where the original gash was. In Jean’s case, trying to figure out how a place so small could produce not only death, but so much blood. They’d been driving by for a week as the snow melted, looking for what was left of the evidence of the act. Then the whole town had come to look at her after George Preston had done his job. Lucky and Evelyn were there in the front, holding my mother up as everyone in Franklin told her how sorry they were, not only about her daughter, but her son. Was it true that he had even gone and thrown his paper route the following morning? Wasn’t that when the spirit that she was left her body?
Even Percy made his way there, sitting with me in the back because he knew what was like to feel outcast. Wanda Jean and Nelly, Lucky’s sisters were there, and all Mama’s brothers and sisters, so many that I hardly knew all their names. Lucky’s friends, too, Sammy Samuels, Jimmy Langford, John Harvey, Paul Chester, Sr. With Jimmy was his son Ronnie, and with Ronnie was Fred Burkitt, big, lumbering Fred Burkitt, who still had both his arms and was minus the contraption he normally wore on the one that was gone just below the mostly withered bicep.
“Wasn’t her name Inez?” I heard Dr. Guppy ask Lucky.
For a long moment, Lucky didn’t respond. He had that characteristic smirk on his face, I knew that. Was holding himself in such a way he appeared taller, his chest poked out. I knew the posture and the facial expression, because I , even at nine, used them often, too.
“How long’s that been?”
“Longer than I’d care to admit,”Lucky answered.“So long that it seems like another lifetime…but you know, in another way, it seems like yesterday. I can still see her layin’there, plain as day. Spread out on the ground where they’d put her. I can still remember thinkin’, how does somethin’like this happen so quick? It never will make sense to me. Even with Jean, if she don’t make it, God for–bid,”his voice broke,“it took a few hours for it to happen.” For the only time that I could ever recall, Lucky cried, tears that did not dam in his chest, but ones that found their way up through his throat and out his eyes and down his cheeks. I could hear the looseness, the release, in his voice.“With Inez, though, there wasn’t no warning or nothin’.”
“Refresh my memory,”said Dr. Guppy.“How did it happen?”
He could ask questions that, if from someone else, would seem at least callous, at most monstrous.
For a long time Lucky was silent, so much so that the house cracked with it, filled itself with its presence. He cleared his throat or coughed a couple of times, I couldn’t tell which from the bottom step, the place to which I had returned after the dream about Jean had awakened me. I was surprised that my hollering when everyone in the funeral home had begun to accuse me of killing her just before I had awakened hadn’t brought anyone to check on me. But the sounds had merely echoed off the sloped ceiling and paper-covered walls and fallen into the silence surrounding me.
“You know, we never was sure,”Lucky finally said.“We just found her down by the river.” He laughed sadly.“Percy and me accused each other of it for a long time. Said that she’d been down there watchin’us swim. We never was sure. She wasn’t but ten. We never did know why she went in. The only thing I could ever figure is Percy and me had been down there the week before and gone in the water. Matter a’fact, it was the only time I can ever remember him goin’in the water. He like to drowned himself. I had to go in and get him out.”
I heard Lucky try three or four times to produce a flame to light a cigarette. Dr. Guppy cleared his throat twice.
“They always thought that Inez must’a been behind us that week that me and Percy went down there. Must’a seen us go in. The rains come in the next week and the river swelled, especially down there in its bottom, and she must’a decided that she was gonna go in like us. I’ve always wondered if that’s the reason Percy talks about that goddam river all the time.”
Dr. Guppy laughed sad, like Lucky had earlier.“Might be. When’ve you seen him?”
Briefly, I heard my mother and Evelyn’s voices in the room. Coming to check to see if anything had changed, I assumed. Dr. Guppy told them that nothing had, in the last hour. I stretched to look at the clock on the kitchen wall. I’d have to leave in an hour or so.
“You know, that‘bout killed Mother and Daddy,”said Lucky.“Like I said‘while ago, I can still see her body layin’there on the ground after they’d pulled her out. She had that look that people do after they drown. You know, they don’t look like theirself.. Like their body ain’t theirs anymore. I remember, when they found her and come to get Daddy, he took his Bible and read a verse out of it as he sat down by her. You know, Johnny, I can’t remember the words he read…couldn’t tell you the verse, but I can still see him sittin’there, chokin’back the tears with every breath and then Mother comin’and gettin’on her knees and huggin’him as he read.”
Personally, I’d heard of Inez only a couple of times. Until this moment, I’d not known how she died, just that she had while they were children.
“When was the last time you said you saw Percy?”
“I don’t know, maybe a month.”
“You know, when we talked about him goin’somewhere, I didn’t intend for him to be there this long,”said John Guppy.“I, like you, didn’t want him to take the brunt of the town’s wrath for tearin’up that cemetery. You and I both know that he wasn’t strong enough to have done that; nor would he have done it. But…I guess I saw it as an opportunity to get him in somewhere that could help him. He’d needed it for awhile. You know that. Your mother and father knew that.”
“Yeah, I reckon it’s easier to ignore somethin’,”said Lucky.“At least till you can’t ignore it anymore.”
“Yeah, I guess we’re all guilty of that sometimes,”said Johnny Guppy.
“I think you did the right thing by Percy,”said Dr. Guppy.”I’m afraid he’s on a bad course. By what we’ve done we might slow it or even give him a chance to be better. Even though they don’t know a lot about what’s wrong with him, they do know kind’a what to do to help.”
“You mean shockin’the hell out of him?”
“Those treatments are a part of his overall treatment there. I’ve talked with the doctor that’s treating him. He thinks they’ve helped him enough that he’s stable now....”
I heard my mother and Evelyn at the door once more, talking so quietly I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Poised in sadness, reaching for hope. They seemed unable to enter the room where she lay, where in some strange way our whole existence seemed to rest in the balance.
“In all honesty, it’s not a cure-all, but as far as they can tell it seems to create an arresting affect of the most significant symptoms. I’m sorry, I’m falling into speaking like a doctor—what I mean is that most of what’s wrong with him can be counteracted by treatment. The shock seems to make the symptoms go away for a prolonged period of time, maybe years.”
“So…he is crazy?” said Lucky.“I mean, sometimes I know that. Like the last time I went to see him he was so normal it almost scared me. He was talkin’about the news different. He talked about us finishin’off the Krauts and the Japs and it not havin’a thing to do with him…Roosevelt dyin’and Truman takin’over and it not havin’a thing to do with him. When I see him like that, even though it’s been years since the last time I did, I know that he’s been crazy as hell for a long time and I’ve just grown as used to it as the change in the seasons. Come to expect it without even knowin’it.”
I heard Dr. Guppy rustling around, rifling through his bag, I imagined. Maybe taking Jean’s pulse and blood pressure and temperature as I’d seen him do several times when I’d peeked around the corner from my hiding place.“She’s still stable,”he said.“That’s a good sign, Lucky. A damn good one. It’s been going on eight hours since it happened now. If she’s been stable this long, it means that she’s likely to stay stable.”
“So what does it look like from here?” Lucky asked.
“I’m hopeful,”said Johnny Guppy.“Hopeful for Jean…and for Percy.”
“You still tellin’me that it’ll take the same thing?” Lucky asked.“Somebody being willin’to vouch that they’ll take care of him?”
“We’d have to have a hearing, but that would go a long way…somebody saying something that they’d watch out for and take care of him. It’d be somethin’like the hearin’we told Percy we could have if he didn’t consent to go into Central State. It’d just be reversed…and it wouldn’t necessarily have to be in a court. We’d just have to have a group a’the professionals that have worked with him say that he’s fit to return to general population.”
“Do you think he is?” Lucky asked.
“Realistically, I don’t think that Percy’s a danger to anybody or anything. Maybe himself…but that’s probably it. And I can’t imagine what’s worse: him havin’to live in the place where he is the rest of his life…or the slight possibility that he might hurt himself.”
“Then maybe it was the wrong thing to leave him in there,”said Lucky.
As I sat on the stairs, the door still cracked as it had been most of the night, I wanted to scream through the opening that Lucky damn well knew it had been wrong. If he had ever at any point stepped forward and requested he come out, if he had not gotten him sent up the river for something he didn’t do in the first place…. if he had ever acted as if it were even happening, instead of just ignoring the fact that Percy had basically disappeared for six months. I wanted to tell him from my place there in the stairwell that he was only talking about it now to avoid the fact Jean was laying on her possible deathbed. But I simply sat still and quiet, knowing as the months had grown, Lucky seemed to be able to stand his presence less and less. His tolerance for him had dimmed like the lights in Central State at eight o’clock in the evening.
“Do you have to leave so soon?” Percy had asked him the last time we’d been there.
“Yeah. Mary’s waitin’dinner on us. Better be goin’so that we don’t keep her and Jean waitin’. You know that Mary, she can get pretty mean if you ain’t there to eat her supper on time.”
This is what Lucky had told me in the parking lot that he’d say when we needed to leave, which had occurred after just ten minutes. After he spoke he paced the room, his eyes set on the floor, waiting for me, I guess, to arise from the seat I’d taken in the corner.
“Can Henry stay awhile?” Percy asked.“It gets pretty lonesome in here.”
“That’s just‘cause you don’t have nothin’to do with other people here. They’re prob’ly good people. Prob’ly just got problems…just like you.”
“How would you know?” spat Percy.“You’re never here long enough to even see any them.”
Lucky stopped at the corner nearest the door and stared across the room at Percy, where he had sat in the chair next to me.
“Why don’t you stay in here a few days and see how much you’d feel like socializin’with the other patients? It’s not the most enjoyable place in the world.”
“We all have to do things don’t want to do,”said Lucky.“That’s just a part of life, Percy. Sometimes, I don’t think you’ve ever learned that. Do you think anybody here wants to be?”
“I don’t know about anybody else…I can’t speak for them. Only for myself. Most of them are casualties of war…not of their damned brother.”
I could see the rage in Lucky brewing as he stopped his movement toward the door, cut angry eyes back across the room at Percy. He shook his head and cleared his throat like he did when he was nervous, or didn’t like what someone had said.
“Henry, come on in a few minutes,”he saidas he drew the door open and passed through.
Each time Lucky would leave, Percy would appear all over again as he had the first time we had left him: like somehow he’d lost his best friend.
“Some of these people,”Percy said after Lucky had exited,“they won’t even let them have a table in their room.” He made a face I assume he thought looked crazy.“They might use it as a weapon against themselves…or someone else. I know you all thought I was crazy…but I couldn’t hold a candle to some of the people in this place. Going through what a lot of these men did, it makes people lose their bearings.
“You wouldn’t believe what that war has done to some of these men. They act as if it hasn’t bothered them…but then they just sit and stare into corners for hours at a time. Talk to themselves. Don’t say anything to anybody else.” He fished a cigarette out of the pack in his sock and a book of matches out of his pocket.“I guess your daddy would say that that’s just like me.” .
I nodded, trying to be polite. Watched out the crack of the door for the kinds of men he spoke about. Pictured in my head the one’sI’d seen sitting in the main room when we came in.
“I guess I’m lucky,”he told me.“At least they let me smoke…have a way to light my cigarettes. Some of those men, they don’t even let them have their cigarettes. They have to go to the desk and ask the nurse for one…ask them to light it. It makes me feel sorry for them. But I know at the same time, that they’re heroes. It makes me wonder what takes more courage: to stand against killing or to go kill and become numb to it. That’s what made these men go crazy. They haven’t always been that way like me. They’ve gone that way because of what they had to do, what they saw.”
He talked about himself and his craziness now matter-of-factly, like he was reporting the news as they did in the evening on our new television set. It was just that way.
“Maybe all our craziness is the same. I’m not sure. I just know there se
ems to be a kind where people don’t do anything but hurt themselves. And another kind, where people seem to draw other people into it. Destroy them, too.”
Now, when he talked it often seemed someone else was speaking. His face had a bleakness to it, like the person who was once behind it might have left when the electricity hit his system.
“You know, being in here has reminded me that there’s just some things in this life that we have little or no control over. You’d think I would…I mean, it’s me who’s in here. And I guess I could try an escape attempt or something. But it just seems as if all the powers that be, both seen and unseen, have landed me here. It’s almost like it’s where I’m supposed to be. Not just because I’m crazy, mind you, but in that everything that seems to have any influence at all has seemed to move me in this direction. That’s one of the hardest part of our existence, Henry…going from believing something is random to believing it is planned. Or that it’s part of some plan, some....” Quietly at first, then more loudly, came a knock at the door. Sure it was Lucky, irritated because I had sat and listened to his brother too long, I was already up from the chair. The knock came more loudly a third time, scaring me so that I apologized all the way to the door, reminding myself of my mother. What I found when I opened it was a short, somewhat strange-looking man with thinning salt and pepper hair, his hand raised to knock a fourth time.
“Hello, Efim,”said Percy, half-smiling.“Don’t tell your father I have a friend in here,”he told me,“the more miserable he thinks I am…. Anyway, I tell them to wait‘til he leaves to come by.”
“Allo,”Efim said to me as he took the only other chair in the room.
“Efim’s from the down the hall,”he said.“He’s kind of an outsider, too. He’s a Russian-Polish Jew—Dillard would certainly say that’s two if not three strikes against him—a weightlifting coach, who made it out with his family and somehow made it here. Came through Ellis Island, met someone there who told him there might be work down here. After he got to Nashville, he somehow began to believe that everyone on his street was out to get him, coming to take him away. He held his wife and his kids at gunpoint for a week, believing he was fending off his neighbors. Now, that’s more my kind of crazy. Not crazy like a hero, but more self-centered and deluded like me. Anyway, he doesn’t speak very good English. Does calisthenics in front of his window in the nude every morning. They’ve had to take to shutting his shade and taping it shut with electrical tape so that he won’t raise it in the morning. Or at least it makes it harder.”