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

by Trey Holt

  Obviously speaking good enough English to know what Percy was saying, Efim started to demonstrate his routine for me. He threw his arms out in front of himself, shook his hands and fingers, then lowered himself in a partial-squat before he arose once more. His exhibition made me glad Lucky had gone. Even if he was in the car cussing me at that very moment.

  “They’re having some kind of meeting about him this week. Called a Denova or something. Never heard of it. But it’s where they’ll try to force him to take his medicine because he’s refused it for so long.” Around here, they think medicine will cure anything. I’ve a feeling that’s where the country’s going. Like what I was telling you about black and white living together, going to school together.”

  I laughed like I had the first time he had told me that. Efim chuckled while he was still raising and lowering himself in the doorway. For a moment, I tried to imagine what this would look like if he were naked. I couldn’t. So I turned back to Percy.

  “I guess—”Percy began, but didn’t finish.

  “Papsi,”said Efim. He smiled as big as he could at my uncle.“Papsi,”he repeated.

  I looked at Percy for interpretation.

  “Pepsi Cola,”said Percy.“He wants a Pepsi Cola. He and his family don’t have much. His wife brings him a quarter a week. Nothing’s free here but the horrible food they serve three times a day and whatever drink concoction they give you with that. Toilet water, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, he loves Hershey bars and Pepsi Cola. Dillard, out of guilt, brings me money. If you’ll look now, there’s some in that sack he left over there. I bet it’s brownies your mother made and a few dollars. It makes him feel better for a little while, like he’s doing something to help me.”

  I studied Percy’s face as he talked. Its gaunt paleness made the circles under his eyes more definite. He drew on the cigarette he’d lit and pointed to Efim, who was now becoming out of breath and puffing like a locomotive, and laughed. Efim stopped and smiled.

  Percy made his way to his nightstand and fished in the back of the drawer until he came out with some change and handed it to Efim. He told him he wanted one, too, a Pepsi, that was, not a Hershey bar. Asked him to hurry back so he could tell him the last of what he’d been telling him earlier in the day. He hoped he could remember it, he told him, because they had come and got him that morning and….

  I’d looked at the clock, I know, fifty times, all the time hoping that Lucky was drinking, enjoying a few minutes of peace and quiet that he usually didn’t get. When Efim pushed the door open once more, he handed me a Pepsi and a Hershey bar, signaled to Percy by touching his pocket that he’d bought mine with his money. I thanked him and told Percy I’d better be going.

  “No–stay–story,”said Efim.“Stay–story.”

  “What?” I asked Percy.

  “He wants you to stay while I finish telling him a story I was telling him earlier in the day.”

  Efim walked to an empty chair, patted its seat.

  “I better go,”I told Percy.“You know Lucky’s goin’to be here lookin’for me.”

  “Go ahead…go ahead,”he said.“You know as well as I do that you don’t want Dillard on your badside. You might end up some place like this.”

  “No-no-no…stay,”said Efim, smiling.

  I couldn’t help smiling back at him.

  “He’s right,”said Percy.“Stay. It serves him right…to come and bring you and just stay a few minutes. He’s expected me to stay months in this hellhole and all he can produce the will to do is stay long enough to drop off Mary’s brownies.”

  Efim patted the empty chair again and smiled. I tried to imagine him holding his wife and children hostage, afraid that his neighbors were coming to get him. I could not.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  From the cotton gin to the Carter House, the fighting was desperate. Men charged into the rifles firing as if they were running into a strong wind, their heads down, their caps the only shield from the lead death approaching them from the end of the enemy’s rifles.

  A Federal officer, wrote,“I saw a confederate soldier, close to me, thrust one of our men through with a bayonet, and before he could draw his weapon from the ghastly wound his brains were scattered on all of us who stood near, by the butt of a musket swung with terrible force by some big fellow whom I could not recognize in the grim dirt and smoke that enveloped us.”

  A member of the 100thOhio Infantry said,“I saw three confederates standing within our lines, as if they had dropped down unseen from the sky. They stood there for an instant, guns in hand, neither offering to shoot nor surrender—dazed as in a dream. I raised my gun, but instinctively I felt as if about to commit murder—they were hopeless, and I turned my face to the foe trying to chamber our abatis. When I looked again the three were down—apparently dead; whether shot by their own men or ours, who could tell?”

  The battle wasn’t confined to the center of the Federal troops, though. On the left and the right, things had gone worse than they had in the center. Forrest’s two divisions on Stewart’s right had pushed back the Federal cavalry early in the fighting, and had crossed the Harpeth River. Upstream, the dismounted cavalries from both armies fought a hell of a fight. On the right side of the attack, Stewart’s divisions were crowded to the left by the curve in the river and the higher ground near the railroad. They were even more hindered by the fact that they ran into Osage Orange trees, or hedge apples, and their formation was broken. In the confusion, a Federal battery opened fire on them from almost point blank range. Across the river, from an earthen fort called Fort Granger, shells poured into their lines. The ditches of the works were already filled three and four-deep with the dead.

  Long after dark, Hood sent Johnson’s division of Lee’s corps stumbling and falling through the locust grove west of Columbia Pike: a last-gasp assault upon the works west of the Carter House. But the battle was over. Over! And the last charge was no more than the other charges had been—a waste of men. Until nine o’clock that night, November 30, 1864, the fighting would continue. Attackers and defenders firing at no more than the mere flashing of guns. And then, at last, the night was as quiet as death. The Rebels drew back. And the front was quiet as the night previous.

  At eleven o’clock, while most of Hood’s remaining men slept, Schofield started his withdrawal. At the crack of dawn, Hood’s artillery began to blaze away once more and the confederate officers, at least those left, began to prepare for a new assault. Soon, though, it was discovered that the Yankees had stolen away in the night.

  There had been enough tragedy the day before to last a lifetime. Generals Adams, Granbury, Gist, Strahl and Cleburne were all lost, laid out on the porch of the Carnton mansion. Tod Carter had been mortally wounded and taken to his own house to die. Overall, comparing the losses with another battle, Pickett’s loss at Gettysburg was 2,882, while at Franklin the Confederate Army suffered over 6,000 casualties! The Army of Tennessee had penetrated the breastworks and then had renewed its charge time after time. Though they had not prevailed against Schofield or stopped his movement toward Nashville and further north, they had shown their commander they could fight without the aid of breastworks. If I were to quote the bastard, I would say something of the nature,“Never have troops fought more gallantly.” They, the men who had charged again and again into the Federal lines, now belonged to the school of Lee and Jackson, an aristocracy of valor, atop the hierarchy of fighting men.

  Gerneral Strahl, who would soon lose his life, said just before the charge began,“Boys, this will be short but desperate.”

  And so it would be.

  + + +

  When he got to this point, he always sighed, shook his head and turned his eyes to the floor. Depending on how sane he was at the moment, he might throw in a couple of comments about Walter if he was on the farside of his mental health. The second time around, when he had become so enraptured with religious ideas (which, he would assure me, these weren’t; matters of faith and religion ha
ve very little if anything to do with each other, he would say), he would tell me that this was a fine example of God’s grace: that even someone like John Bell Hood could be loved eternally by God. To which Lucky responded that he just got nuttier with the years. Not to him of course, but behind his back, when he stepped out of the room to smoke a cigarette.

  Years before, almost eight years and ten months to be exact, he seemed to use these stories to connect with people, in a strange but almost desperate attempt to allow someone to see into him, to identify some vestige of his tortured soul. But now, it seemed, he used them more to hold people away, like armor to keep himself from being exposed, to keep from revealing what the second half of his life had done to him.

  Overall, it was hard to believe that nine years had passed since the last time he was in the“crazy house,”as he would call it after his first release, which he referred to as his“escape,”and credited to the fact that Jean lived from the blow that I inflicted upon her. Percy, of all people, was probably the one family member who actually believed me when I regained my voice and tried to explain exactly what had happened, that is, as best I could remember and recount it. None the less, in his better, lighter moments, when he wasn’t worried about the grace of God or the three components of every human event, he would often refer to the event as“when you hit Jean in the head with a shovel to try to regain the upper hand on the bedroom situation.” He would then go on to remind me that he knew relationships with siblings could be hell.

  Nevertheless, after Lucky sprung him from the crazy house, he was eternally grateful to him. Over and over and over he’d ask me what was said between Lucky and Dr. Guppy that night, what they talked about that had somehow changed Lucky’s mind. What had made him come down to the crazy house the next day and begin working with the doctor to let him out. Or perhaps it was just almost losing Jean, he surmised; something like that could penetrate the hardest of hearts. I never mentioned to him in any of our conversations that Lucky and Dr. Guppy had discussed Inez. I concluded that what had been silent and unspoken for a quarter century was likely better off left that way.

  + + +

  For the two weeks he’d stay in Central State in 1953, the breadth of his ideas had seemed to increase to encompass almost everything he had talked about in the past: Randomness, A Planned Nature of Things, Human Frailtyand God’s never-ending grace. He continued to attempt to explain the Battle of Franklin to me, and in his opinion, how it affected the Battle of Nashville, and, thus the Civil War and how the war affected what America was to become, and in general, what we were to become living as Americans.

  On his bad days, he was still convinced that Walter roamed the earth, was eternal and omnipresent, from everywhere from the Battle of Franklin, Hood’s confidant and advisor, to the Cemetery that night to Christine Smithson’s house, in the shrubs, watching and tattling on him like a jealous schoolboy.

  “Better than the way he was last time, I guess,”Lucky said the day he was taking him back to Central State. After the standoff at our house.“The last time he was convinced that the goddam pig was on trial at Nuremberg. You remember when he kept saying that they had the number wrong in the news? That they’d said they were trying twenty-one of those Krauts, and that they’d missed the most important one. Hell, I thought he was talkin’about Hitler, but who was he talkin’about? He was talkin’about Walter the pig!”

  When Lucky said this, on our way back from leaving him there, having to literally pry his fingers loose from the doorjamb of the car, he laughed, a sad sound nonetheless.

  “And then do you remember? When the verdicts came back, he decided that Walter had escaped and would be back to get him. You remember? He screamed,‘How the hell could they prosecute and convict every one of the others, yet let him go! How could that have happened? Walter is a professional at slipping through the cracks!’”

  Lucky shook his head, glad, I am sure, like I was, that the night had finally ended and we had successfully deposited his brother once more at the asylum. That we had been able, with minimal injury, to get him across the parking lot and through the front door. The two large guards who had helped us the last half of the way had been indispensable at getting him through the door. It was the first time I had seen Percy act the way he did. I guess, the only time.

  “Goddam everyone of you!” he had screamed as we all pulled on him, trying to get him into the lobby where they could wrest him to the floor.“Every fucking one of you! Goddam you, Henry! I thought better of you than this! Do I not deserve some semblance of a life? What have I done to deserve this? It’s that goddam pig, isn’t it? I should have known. Walter, you son of a bitch, get off me!”

  “You shouldn’t have done what you did,”Lucky said from his position on top of him.

  I struggled to get his feet still, which is what they’d told me to do. Remembered that I had feared that it was going to come to this on the back porch when Lucky confronted him after he had come in the back door.

  “Old Man Smithson,”he said ,“says he’s gonna turn your ass in. He says that he’d tried to talk to you about it and that you’d just denied it.”

  Percy wouldn’t answer Lucky. Just stood there staring at his shoes and shaking his head.

  “Have you been doin’it?” He took him by the shoulders and tried to make him look into his eyes, which he wouldn’t.“Is what Old Man Smithson told me true?” He shook Percy until he glanced into his eyes.“I’m talkin’to you, Percy! Did Old Man Smithson tell me the truth?”

  I thought how it was odd that Lucky called Mr. Smithson, Old Man, seeing how he was only maybe half a dozen years older than Lucky himself. They had never particularly liked or disliked each other, but simply lived next door. Speaking when spoken to, nodding when the other did. Passing the time of day if necessary. Helping each other if the other needed it. Lucky had explained it saying that he had always resented us because we had a television. I thought the cool feelings were due to Jean snubbing Christine at school. I knew she thought she was odd; she had said that to me a hundred times. Talked about her hair, her glasses, her clothes and her shoes. The things the angel said only when Mama and Lucky weren’t around. Todd, their son a couple of years younger than me, and I had always gotten along. Sometimes I gave him rides on my Indian.

  “What if I did?!” Percy screamed.“Don’t I deserve to have somethin’that’s normal?!”

  “If you did then you ought to go to jail!” Lucky retorted.

  As the two men screamed back and forth at each other, I turned to look at my mother and found in her eyes the look I had grown accustom to over the years. It was the look I assume we all emitted when Lucky’s rage began to overtake him: praying it would not finish claiming his senses and that if it did, someone else would be his target.

  “I’ve lived by this man peacably for going on ten years. Never had one problem!”

  “What about the time that Mrs. Smithson got mad at Mary for what she thought was stealing her laundry?”

  Lucky paused for a moment, like he was having a hard time remembering. Their sheets had blown into our yard off the clothes line, gotten mixed up with ours.

  “What about their dog stealing your papers?”

  Lucky shook his head back and forth, stared through his brother insolently.

  “You can’t go to jail for either of them things,”Lucky told him. His hands were bound in fists at his sides, both of them and his voice beginning to shake.

  “There could be no worse jail than where you left me for months eight years ago.”

  “You might be findin’out if the old man swears out a warrant on your ass. I can’t control that,”said Lucky.“Goddam you, Percy!” Lucky’s foot made contact with the electric dryer, knocked a dent in it the size a bowling ball would have produced. When he knocked out one of the windows on the back porch with the flat of his hand, his forearm almost immediately bled through his rolled up shirt sleeve. My mother, use to such things, motioned for Jean to go get him a wet towel. He wra
pped it around his arm when she handed it to him.

  “I can’t get you out of this. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Do you mean that you can’t make up something else I did so they can ship me off to the crazy house again? Shock the hell out of me for months. I’m sure you can come up with somethin’.”

  For the entirety of the exchange between them, Lucky had been positioned between Percy and the door. His job had taught him to do such things, I imagined. My suspicion was that Percy wasn’t leaving the house of his own will. He made a few slow steps toward the door.

  “This’ll kill Mother and Daddy,”Lucky said.“Don’t you know that?”

  “I don’t ever recall doing anything like this before,”said Percy.“Never has my life, for one minute, seemed normal…seemed like I could have what everybody else does.”

  “No, you’d have to have a goddam job first,”Lucky said. He lifted the towel and daubed at the blood still flowing.“And you couldn’t even hold the simplest of those…at Earl’s Fruit Stand.”

  “Some of us aren’t meant to work jobs like that! You’ve never understood that…or you’ve forgotten it if you ever did!”

  As I watched them trade their views of the world, of life,back and forth, it seemed to me that both of them had forgotten, even the though the name of the malady wasn’t readily spoken, Percy wasn’t like the rest of us. Couldn’t be. It wasn’t a question of laziness…but craziness.