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

by Trey Holt

  “He was really just like most every boy I’ve ever been out with,”she said.“He wanted what he wanted and he was willing to tell you what you wanted to hear to get it.” She tried to draw the tears back into the corners of her eyes, to keep them from further damaging the mascara, its running remnants. She caught them with the end of her index finger, wiped them on her skirt.“I’m sorry. Just thinking back through it makes me sad. There’s been so many…all of them in their own way like him. Knowing that they’ve got somethin’on you. Knowin’that they’ve seen where you live. I live in the“Mixed Section,”did you know that?”

  Of course I did.

  “I live in the section of town where the darkies live…the coons…the niggers. The only white people who live there are the people who can’t live anywhere else. You know if this goddam town had its way, they’d get rid of all of us, the poor white people and the colored. I’ll guarantee you when they figure out who killed that woman, it’ll be somebody from our section of town. It might not be one of the Mosby’s, but it’ll be somebody that lived over there. You saw the article that came out after they found her—not the one about your father—the one that said how they need to get rid of the element that caused this whole thing. Well, I’ll tell ya this, they don’t have to try to very hard to get rid of me. I’m ready to leave them…Mama…Bobby…Daddy and Sheila’s ghosts all behind. You know, I will say one thing for Van, at least he didn’t fuck me after Sheila died. At least he didn’t use that so he could have gotten more of what he wanted!”

  In the moments following her raw exultation, I found myself assuring her that whatever she experienced she would not experience the same in kind with me. I wasn’t like all the others, I explained to her, but somehow different, I believed. There would be no fucking and leaving with me…only fucking. And what the hell if Lucky didn’t like trailers? He didn’t like a lot of things. And about the other boys, it really didn’t make a difference. What was the difference between ten, twelve, etc.? I wasn’t going to ask. The whole thing had calmed me for some reason. Somehow made me her salvation rather than just another stop along the way. Just another fuck. If I had anything, had ever had anything besides the football career that had left me on that previous September night, it had always been perseverance. I could stay the course better than anybody I knew.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lucky stood at the kitchen window, his hands propped on the edge of the sink and his back slightly hunched, watching the rain continue to wash away easy memory of the fallen snow. He sipped at a cup of coffee, never breaking his gaze on the Smithson’s house and backyard. My own eyes wandered from his image to the edge of the carport where the bushes at the back of their yard started. I thought about how Christine Smithson had been sent away to live with her aunt shortly after she had admitted to her misdeeds with Percy, how it had afforded her to miss the last few days and what it had somehow strangely transformed Franklin into. How it had afforded her the opportunity to miss that last weekend in September, those strangest of days. I wondered if she even knew, or if she did, what she knew. If she even had contact with her family. The times I had seen Old Man Smithson he had simply been wandering the backyard, like he was perhaps still looking for evidence of what they had done or someone else who had taken their place, doing it. From the look he wore under his low-slung hat, he may have believed what she had done was somehow his fault, his doing. I finally concluded that I did not know, and as with many things, would probably never know. I only knew that there are moments in which it seems that strangeness brings clarity, or a completely unique thought or vantage point serves as the springboard into an idea that somehow seems as if it is guiding the synthesis of the moments that have come before it. I also knew that this morning would be another that would perhaps later be, as had other days come and passed, that way.

  From my clothes still damp, I searched for a cigarette and lit it and watched Lucky as he stood at the kitchen window and did the same. From where I was under the carport, it appeared that he was intermittently speaking one or two word answers to my mother or Jean when they passed through the room behind him. Then he would take to his staring once more. Perhaps at nothing. Perhaps at everything.

  The weather had warmed so much that I hardly noticed I was wet again from my ride back from the river and Sharon’s and my meeting place. I wondered if Lucky would even question why I had come back home, guessed that he would assume that I had returned home because I was wet, to change clothes before my Thursday morning, two-block journey to the Academy. I wondered if he even knew what time I normally came home from my paper route, if he had noticed that I hadn’t been doing so the last few months. I wondered if he knew this day would be different from all before it. I wanted him to know that because I knew it.

  “Maybe something new will help and things will change. If not, maybe something new will just make the pain from the old go away for a while…just a little while,”she had told me after she’d returned to what seemed to be herself in the car. The smeared mascara had turned itself into streaks down her cheeks, tiny black rivers flowing over her high cheek bones and toward the corners of her mouth. It was one of the only times in our long tenure as lovers and friends that she would overtly grieve the death of her father and sister, although it seemed to me that it almost always affected most things she did. The ice, to her, was always thin, ready to give when any weight was placed on it.

  “You really think it’d be good?” I asked her, the way someone might when they have at some level already agreed with what was said.

  “I do,”she chirped. She was back to the side of herself that wore a perpetual smile, laughed off tragedies like they were simply bad days.“I just don’t see any reason to live in the past. Do you? What’s happened has happened. There’s really nothing you can do about it. I don’t know one thing that can be done to change anything that’s happened.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think you can ignore it either,”I told her, slipping back on my pants, surprisingly dry.

  I wondered how much time we’d spent, her telling me how horrible it had been to hear the words she had heard from me last July. How it had cemented in her mind how good a man…a boy…whatever I was, I was. How her mother was crazy as hell now, her words.

  “Yeah, but you like to live back there,”she’d told me, which had made me madder than hell.“You kind of ruminate over everything. I know you don’t often say it…or maybe don’t say it all the time, but you have it in your head, I can tell.”

  I wanted to ask her how the hell she had any idea of what was in my head, but didn’t.I wanted to tell her that at least I hadn’t fucked ten guys. But the truth kicked me in the ass: that I was a virgin. As bad for a guy as what she had done was for a girl, which didn’t make much sense to me. But I simply said I thought she was right, agreed with her. Then asked her where in the hell we might get the money to carry out the fool thing she was talking about.

  “I’ve got some money saved,”she told me.“I’ve been saving money since I was fourteen. Maybe if I was from another part of Franklin…maybe then I could stay here…could’ve stayed here. But we’ll never be anything here but poor white trash people…after all we live in the‘mixed’section of town. I bet even if I marry you, that’s how people would always think about me. But I’m going to show them. What about you? Do you have any money saved?”

  I started to tell her that I had but that Lucky the bastard and the Academy had taken it from me. At least for all practical purposes. But I’d never even mentioned it to her. That’s how much I rume—what the hell was that word? I couldn’t even remember. Further proof that I didn’t sit around and think about all the muddy water that had passed under the goddam bridge.

  “Maybe a hundred dollars,”I admitted to her, watched the rain slack for a few seconds, then start again, its rhythm dividing the silence into tiny segments.“How much have you got?”

  “More than that. Enough that we could get a tin box on wheels. Wouldn’t you like to do
that?”

  I didn’t answer her because I was reliving for the thousandth time the conversation in Dr. Bugg’s office. Of all the things that had come down the pike and hit me head-on since the summer, it was the hardest for me to believe.

  “We’re going to ask you to pay half of the tuition this year,”he had told me, staring at me the way he did at people when he was trying to intimidate them.

  My nervous eyes fluttered over his shoulders to his degrees on the wall. I tried to remember what Ph.D. stood for and then remembered he wasn’t one. An Ed.D., he had.

  “As a matter of fact, you’re really fortunate to finish…after what happened. You know with an honor offense like this we hold the right to the discretion of dismissing you.”

  Lucky had told me not to say a word, do nothing to incriminate myself. Reassured me that they couldn’t prove a goddam thing, his words. Little had I suspected they wouldn’t try to, just take a parting shot with what they had left to swing.

  “Yessir,”I told him, feeling like I needed to remove my lips from his ass.

  “Does that seem fair to you? I mean, you won’t be able to play baseball in the spring. You still had at least two-thirds of the football season left.”

  “Six games,”I’d told him before I caught myself. Did catch myself before I asked him if he ever played football.

  “And then there’s what happened after that.”

  “Yessir,”I agreed, biting my lip on the inside where he couldn’t see it.

  Lucky and I had talked about it the evening before, after I had been notified of the meeting the nest day.“Just agree with whatever he says,”he’d told me.“The word is he’s gonna give you a break. At least that’s what I heard through Paul Chester down at the store.”

  Really, I imagined, when he had been shooting craps with him the night before. It seemed like he hadn’t been home since September. Nevertheless, Paul Chester had talked to Dr. Bugg’s secretary and she had somehow known of the“deal”he was going to offer.

  Lucky had tried to explain his vantage point to me the night before the meeting, under the same carport where I now stood watching him. He’d assured me neither Mama nor Jean needed to know a damn thing about any of this. They didn’t understand that sometimes you won by knowing where you stood. He knew where he stood, he slurred to me; he knew what he come from. A farmer’s son, a crazy man’s brother. He’d banked it all on me, too much on me. Then he’d just hushed. Not said anything else except for me to do what they asked.

  Like I was hearing them again, Sharon’s words right before we left the river still echoed in the valley of my memory.“I know I just brought this up to you today, so I’m not saying that I want to do it today…or really even this week…or even this month. I just want you to think about it.”

  “Don’t we have to be eighteen?” I asked her. Somehow, my leather jacket, my motorcycle, the fact that I’d been the best football player in Franklin since Ronnie Langford, these things no longer covered my naiveté.

  “Eighteen or somebody sign for you. Or make them believe you’re eighteen. I believe Mama would sign for me. I know she wants me to stay around to take care of Suzy. But I know she knows, too, that I have to be able to live my own life. I mean, that’s what everybody’s supposed to do, aren’t they? And I know if I leave, Mama’ll just let Bobby come back and live there again. Sometimes I think maybe it’ll get better. That Mama’ll get better…will find somebody else to marry. That Suzy’ll be fine. I guess wherever we ended up, she could come live with us…at least for awhile, if that was all right with you. And…then I think that Bobby’ll get better and not be in and out trouble the rest of his life. And then other times I know that with every change, there has to be something new…something we’ve never experienced before. And even if there’s not a change, maybe something different would just help the pain from the old go away for awhile. I’m tired, Henry. I’m just tired. Just for a little while, I don’t want to be tired anymore. Just a little while. Sometimes…no, most of the time, I feel forty at seventeen.”

  + + +

  Attempting to remember Sharon’s words had so engulfed me that I didn’t notice him or his coughing until he laid his nicotine-stained hand on my shoulder. He looked short to me, maybe even shorter than he’d been before, like the last few days, the last few months, had stolen something from him, his stature. Had placed some invisible weight on his back that had hunched his shoulders and seemed as if it might buckle his knees.

  “Did you get wet?” he laughed, sputtered once more.

  “Yeah, I guess.” I pinched my pants at the pocket, wondered if they were as wet as they would have been had I not dried them on the heater Bobby Bishop fixed.

  He leaned against his Ford, looked into the squad car.“Why didn’t you take the Ford?”

  “I thought it’d be easier on the Indian. I figured it’d be easier to get around, too, with the snow and all. But then it quit snowin’....”

  “Yeah, I been out in it already,”he said. He lit a cigarette and offered me one, which I refused.

  Fear shot through me that he’d been by the river, seen her car or spotted my motorcycle in the bushes. It quieted when I let the part of me that believed he knew about us speak louder in my head, snuff out the other voices. I laughed to myself in the silence between our words, thought about one of the last things Percy had said to me: that he was no longer sure he was crazy because he had never heard voices. The few people he’d talked to while he was there in the end of August, while they were fryin’his brain again, cookin’the life out of him, most all of them said they heard voices that weren’t their own.“They can only take so much of your soul,”Percy had told me.“But they’ve quieted Walter,”he told me.“I guess that’s the important thing. He’s not talking to me anymore. But, you know, he never did really talk to me. It makes me wonder if I’m really what they call‘crazy,’because so many men I’m in here with have imaginary figures talkin’to them. First of all, Walter’s not imaginary…and second, he doesn’t talk. I’d say the way he communicates with me is more“telepathic”in nature. Do you know what that word means, Henry?”

  I shook my head. Efim, on the otherside of the room, nodded. He was back for his tenth or so stint at the nuthouse, a new term Percy used for it. They had become fast friends after these eight years, not having seen each other.

  “I bet Efim knows,”said Percy, the nuthouse’s own college professor.

  “It mean when toughts toe stong zat zey do not af to be spokken,”Efim said, obviously having come by better English in the last few years.“I af ad a few of dem myself.”

  Percy cut his eyes at me from across the room, suggesting that he believed that Efim might be able to define the word but possibly had no real-life experience of such phenomena. The story had gone that Efim had submitted to the will of the state back when he was there in‘45, and then had been able to keep under control his impulse to hold his wife hostage. Five years later, though, he had begun to believe Dwight D. Eisenhower was personally going to send him back to Russia and that he was somehow secretly in cahoots with Hitler, not really dead like they said he was. That, along with his bent toward doing naked calisthenics in front of the window of his small brick house, had landed him back at least once a year since then. He said he’d spent his other time learning the English language.“Vich I must zay I fell I have become quiet—how you zay?—profizient at. Vouldn’t you zay?”

  I nodded my head at the short, strangely complected man with a round and placid face, bulging eyes.

  “Why is your father not coming?” Percy asked, changing the subject on a dime.

  I stared at the floor, watched my feet as they crossed and uncrossed. I wanted to give him a good answer, one that at least made sense. But there was none that I knew of: as long as he says he’s tried for years and years…let you live with us…been embarrassed around town…took you in when I guess he could have left you in the country with your parents…as long as these things don’t suffice for an
answer. Perhaps, he would’ve kept trying forever…but then you went and fucked Christine Smithson and left him no choice except that you disappear or go to the penitentiary…or Old Man Smithson come out of the house with his rifle and do you in. Some people handled things like this, Lucky had assured me.

  The fact was that I didn’t know. What I did know was that Lucky asked me about him when I got home. Inquired as to whether or not they were“electrocuting”him again, like they had done all those years ago, a question to which I had to respond in the affirmative.

  “Do you think it was the right thing to do?” he’d asked me the other time I’d come home from visiting him, ridden down there while Sharon was at work. I wondered why in the hell he was asking me.“I just didn’t know what else to do.” Then he turned to my mother, who had made her way temporarily through, out and back into the room. She looked at him there in his chair, like I could remember myself doing a few times of late, like she wasn’t sure what had come over him.“What d’you think, Mary? Was it the right thing to do?”

  In the way it seemed only my mother could do, she answered and avoided doing so all at the same time. Most concrete answers, she had a way of allowing other people to take responsibility for. I agreed with her, nodding my head, like I’d seen her do to things he said ten thousand times.

  “I just ain’t sure,”he told us, Jean now having surfaced from her suite. She nodded, of course, patted him on the arm, pretended he didn’t smell like cigarettes and whiskey, hadn’t just made his way in, his knees still dirty from shooting craps down at the filling station. He laughed, sad and resolute, and patted her hand.

  I tried my best to hide my glare, scuffed my feet on the hardwood and watched my weathered boot tops.“He seems all right to me,”I said. Of course, everything in the world, at the moment, was all right to me. I was almost eighteen, Sharon and I had been enjoying the broad front seat of her car for going on a couple of weeks now. The world truly seemed a brighter place.