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

by Trey Holt

  Two days later, Lucky would go without telling any of us, and recount it to me late at night after my mother and Jean were asleep. I pictured Jean standing next to her mostly shut door, her hand cupped around her ear, saddened that he was talking to me about anything he wouldn’t speak about to her, a tear making its way down her fat cheek. It did my heart good.

  “I went to see him today,”was how he began. In his chair, he offered no name, no introduction more than that. I took my place on the couch.

  “You did?” I immediately tried to picture my father and Efim trying to carry on a conversation.

  “Yeah, he had some strange little man in there with him. Couldn’t understand a goddam word he said.”

  Efim was Lucky’s height, I thought, and it didn’t surprise me he couldn’t understand him. Efim probably couldn’t understand him either, his drawl more definite than mine or Percy’s, a sign he was at least on the outskirts of the good ole boy club in Franklin.

  “I finally just acted like he wasn’t in the room and said what I had to say to Percy. He wouldn’t leave.”

  I nodded, picturing him like he’d been the last time I was there, perched in a chair, staring, smiling, because he understood slowly.

  “He said they’s givin’him those goddam shock treatments again. I wish they’d do somethin’else besides that.” He took a cigarette, out of his pocket, a match, stared at them both.”I guess if he’d take anything else they wouldn’t have to. He even said they made him more clear-headed. Told me maybe this was the right thing to do. Did you ever think you’d hear him talkin’like that? I know I didn’t think I would.”

  I shook my head, cursorily.

  He finally lit the cigarette and dropped the match in the ashtray. Drew deep and hard on it. Sputtered quietly, so as, I thought, not to wake Mama and Jean.

  “Maybe I did do the wrong thing.“I just didn’t know what else to do. He really didn’t leave me no choice. You know, people do that sometimes…sew themselves in such a corner that there doesn’t seem to be but one or two ways out…and neither of them ain’t too good. He told me that he didn’t care no more. That we could go on and do whatever the hell we wanted to do. And he didn’t say it mean, he said it more like he just meant it. Like he was…re—what’s that word?”

  “Resolved,”I told him.“I think that’s it.”

  “Okay. Anyway, I got to thinkin’after I left that maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. That even if it was one of a couple of bad choices, maybe that still didn’t make it the right thing to do. I mean, I believe he’s crazy. Both times we’ve took him down there, they believe it too…keep him after the three-day period they can watch somebody. But I ain’t sure that it makes it right what I did to him. He’s my brother.” Lucky choked a little, coughed, stared at his cigarette.“Goddam things.”

  I nodded, again cursorily.

  “I mean, I just ain’t sure what freedom’s worth? And I don’t mean the kind that the Japs and the Germans would take from us if they could. I’m talkin’about the freedom to make your own choices…even if they are wrong. Maybe they are the same kind, I don’t know. All’s I’m really sure of is if we don’t have the freedom to choose what we need to do, then I don’t know how much anything is really worth.”

  For a short moment, I heard rustling sounds coming from the far side of the house, figured it was Jean, trying to listen. Lucky never missed a beat, never took his eyes off the darkened window pane.

  “If you’re forced to do the right thing, is it still the right thing? Or even if you do it because you’re scared of what will happen if you don’t, is it right? I ain’t sure.”

  + + +

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked him.

  “Down at the courthouse,”he told me,“in the basement. Place always seems like it’s about a hundred below.” He grasped himself in his own arms and made a shuddering expression. Then he looked back toward the house, like he might expect Mama or Jean to come out, or that they were watching us.“Lookin’through the archives. You gonna go in and change? What’re you doin’just standin’out here anyway? You know…it’s still not fifty degrees or anythin’. You might get sick just standin’out here.”

  In all the times that he and I had found each other standing out here, I couldn’t recall an instance we’d asked each other what we were doing, what we were thinking. Neither of us, I think, really wanted to know, had any desire to merge the hells.

  “I’m goin’. I’m gonna go in and change clothes…and then off to the academy I’ll be.”

  “It’s pretty early yet. You not goin’early to socialize with Bugg, are ya?”

  “I was thinkin’about it. Thought I might just go right in and prop my feet up on his desk, tell him I was there to visit with him.”

  He laughed, the way I had become accustomed to him doing, with gravel that shook and rattled in his chest and throat. He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and snuffed the life out of it with his boot. Took his hat off and wiped his forehead, glistening with sweat under the pale daylight and the overhead bulb he’d pulled on. He ran his hand over the hair left on his head, the bumps and marks left from Jimmy Langford’s pistol.

  “I need to let Arliss and Jackson out. I ain’t gonna be able to keep them in there forever. You know, in another town, one a little bigger and that probably worked a little better, I couldn’t have ever held either one of them. I ain’t sure whether that’s good or bad.”

  I nodded, watching his eyes as they averted to the backdoor and the sound of its opening. He listened as my mother told him that Miss Helen Riley had called and was waiting to speak with him. She was already at the jail and he could either come there or call her on the phone or the radio. Lucky raised his hand and acknowledged what my mother had told him with a closed-mouth smile. He shook his head and patted me on the back and then began to make his way back into the house through the door that had swung shut when my mother had said her piece and disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The reason he gave for wanting me to go with him was that Lucas Reasonover and Don Walton and Johnny Forrest were already doing other things. The same kind of reason he gave for wanting me to sit with her body that night. The shit work. I wanted to ask him what they could all be doing. But I didn’t. Any excuse to skip a day at the Academy was good enough for me.

  “I’ll let Bugg know I need your help,”he had said when he told me to go in and get ready.“What’re they gonna say? You can’t do it?”

  I had just nodded, watched him as he sat in the driver’s seat of the squad car and lit a cigarette.

  “Reasonover’s gone to Nashville to pick up a sample we had sent to a lab down there. I’ve got Johnny down at the jail. Forrest’s a good man like that. He’s been down there every night with Arliss and Jackson Mosby. I gotta let him go home. His wife and kids have been scared every night this week,‘cause he’s been gone. I had to call Walton to go down to the archives to have him take up where I left off.”

  As I walked away, I cut my eyes back to him. He’d draped his hands over the steering wheel, his back was hunched slightly, as it seemed now most of the time, his hat’s brim rested on his hands, one on top of the other on the steering wheel. His foot was propped against the lowest part of the door, where it had no upholstery but only metal, keeping it open.

  “I need somebody to go with me so I got a witness to what I do. It’s you or the mayor,”he laughed,“but he doesn’t get his ass out’a bed till seven o’clock…and he’s grouchy as hell.”

  Really, I imagined, he just didn’t want to go alone. Even though he lived in a world unbeknownst to most of us around him, at least our family, it was a world that had not seemed infused with loneliness until lately. Had not seemed filled with a desire to avoid it until recent days.

  + + +

  “Where’ve you been?” I asked him.

  Although I never saw them, I imagined Jackson and Arliss to be in the same cell together, one of the two in the jail, no more than a
seven by seven space with a cot on each side. The last time I had been to the jail, I had avoided going through the door past the offices, for the same reason I did on this morning: I was afraid that Jackson Mosby had gotten a good enough look at me from time to time that he might be able to proclaim confidently I was the one he’d seen outside Franklin High School this fall.

  I took a seat in Lucky’s chair while he laid his hat on his desk and disappeared into the relative darkness of the back of the jail. My eyes floated from thing to thing, catching only the objects surrounding me that were familiar. A picture of all of us at church, the only such of its kind: Fourth Avenue Church of Christ having begun taking them for the church directory the year that this one was taken, my estimate three or four years ago. Neither Lucky nor Mama had since made the decision to have it retaken. Just use the same old one. The one with the princess with a scowl painted across her ugly mug. With me looking like I had something up my ass sideways.

  As my view moved to a newspaper article on the wall my mother had framed for Lucky, I tried to recall the situation and could only remember that Fred Creason had written it. As I crossed my feet and propped them on his desk just for the hell of it, I remembered that it had been a story of Lucky shutting down stills down in Little Texas, because the mayor had gotten, according to Lucky off the record, a“wild hair in his ass”and decided that too much of the moonshine was making its way into Franklin. The picture beside the article was one of Lucky and Lucas Reasonover posed with the axes they supposedly destroyed the stills with. I remembered Lucky telling me that he had let them take the picture, write the article, because it would satisfy the powers that were. He had told the Bennings that they could keep making it, he later reported to me after, I think, he’d had some himself, but they would have to move their equipment deeper into the woods. Years later, after Jean had married a man from down in Little Texas and Lucky had left, too, we came across what I suspected to be the same stills in the woods while we were hunting on his family’s property. Jack, Jean’s husband, simply waved at them on the property that met theirs in the woods; they stared for a long moment and then threw up their hands, returning the gesture.

  On the credenza by the far wall, both of which needed a coat of varnish or paint, sat a picture of Lucky’s other family in front of the farmhouse where he was raised. As with most pictures of that day, it appeared that perhaps the subjects had been asked to pretend they were statues as the picture was snapped and the likeness registered. It was my assumption that the picture was probably taken before World War II, maybe even in the late twenties, before the Great Depression that I’d only heard about. Lucky appeared to be perhaps as young as eighteen, with a look on his face as stoic as any I’d ever seen. Beside him was Wanda Jean, a big, hard-looking woman, still closer to a smile than anyone in the picture frame. Beside her was Nellie, shorter than Wanda Jean, built more like Lucky, looking more like my grandmother than grandfather. On the farside of her, Percy. Behind them, my grandmother and grandfather, Lera and Horace. They were good people, Lucky had always told me, just people who would remain forever where they were and like they were, out there on that farm in Thompson Station, Tennessee. People who wanted to know no more…seemed could do no more.

  Lastly, there was a picture of my mother. Sweet Mary, as quiet as any mouse, whose life had revolved hopelessly around ours, around who’s ever made its way into her path. The woman who let Percy live upstairs for time upon end, the same woman who put up with Lucky, the woman whom I could never remember speaking one word of guile about anyone. So unlike the son she would bear and raise. In the picture, she was young, innocence still her ally, a smile not yet more difficult to come by. Her blue eyes pierced the paper the picture was printed on, even in black and white made their way iridescently through the glass that shielded it from the light, the years, even from behind the thick, round glasses that covered them. Years later, for some reason, I would be reminded of it when my son found in a drawer a picture of myself and Sharon at my senior prom, taken five or so months after those few days in December of 1953, innocence, too, still our ally, love its close friend. Me, still thin as a rail besides any weight football had put on me over the years, hair so short it made my ears look twice as big as they really were, not small to begin with. Sharon nearly as big as I was, maybe just a couple of inches shorter, taken away with her hairstyle that night. Living on love, the truth it conveys, the lies it tells. I never told him it had been in my office for years, but simply put it back in the drawer where he found it without explanation.

  In the silence of the distant droning voices of my father and the Mosby’s, I tried to imagine where Percy had been that night, or really, tried not to think about it as soon as the image entered my head. And knowing that I would never ask because there was at least a part of me that did not want to know, assumed he would have had to be in one of the two cells there, as Lucky was probably trying to teach him a lesson. That’s how I could have imagined it. Make sure he wouldn’t do any of it again. I also imagined it as the synthesis of events their combination rendered stranger than they would have been if isolated from one another. How one thing, each thing fairly innocuous, happened after another, until their combination produced something totally separate from themselves. How, if she had not been home, or if that had not been the exact time Lucky had made the decision he did. Or if he’d made the decision from the start to send him back to Thompson Station, I wondered if it would have changed anything. It seemed I had wondered these things, their kind, a thousand times since that last week in September that now seemed as if it might have been years before. A part of me knew there was no use in wondering such things, but then another part could not stop, as if the questions would only be rendered void by thinking about them over and over, not by answers themselves. I knew they, answers to the questions, that is, would never be produced.

  Two days after his first, and at the time, only visit to see Percy in Central State, Lucky would again return to the facility for the crazyasses, Percy’s last characterization of it, and visit him one more time, the second and last visit he would make to his brother in this stint in 1953. Again, it was, to my knowledge, without any of us knowing in the Cleburne Street house, just a clandestine appointment with his brother, the officials there, and I guess, destiny. He would return with the questions he had before, or really the next set. The ones that seem to come after questions like, Is the right thing really right if it’s not freely decided? The questions that no longer contain hypothetical or philosophical elements as their main content, but questions that facts weight more tangibly.

  “I talked to the head man down there…a Guy Tomley…and I talked to Dr. Peterson, Percy’s doctor. He was the same man that treated him back in’45. I explained to‘em what had happened and why he had ended up back there this time…and asked them what they thought.”

  From the looks of him, the smell of his breath, he had obviously made a stop at the filling station to shoot craps and pull on the bottle with his buddies rather than alone, a bit more comfort, I assumed. It was the first night I could recall his waking me up, the first in a series to come over the next couple of months. He looked at me as if he expected me to at the level of consciousness he was, instantly. The light from the kitchen bleeding up the stairwell and into my room was the only illumination.

  “They said they thought he could—” He stopped abruptly, listening for my mother, I imagined., whom I also imagined had told him to get Percy out under no circumstances.“They think he could do just as good here. Said he’s not respondin’as well to the treatment this time. That’s what that Peterson man said…the doctor. He said he’d given it some consideration after we brought him in there this time…he said Percy was probably lonely…that’s why he did what he did with that Smithson girl. Reminded me that he’d never been a danger to anybody…really even hisself. Asked me if this—that’s what he said,‘this’—was the way I wanted my brother to live. He even moved his hand all around, like he was sh
owin’me the place like a used car.‘This,’he said. Is‘this’what you want for your brother? I guess they was all questions I’d been askin’myself. You know, most questions are like that. Other people just help us realize we been askin’ourselves. Your mama does that with me all the time.”

  I peered back at him, my head and neck the only parts of me showing from under the cover, sweating underneath the blanket, producing the smell of salt and worry like I usually did at night. I was not only unsure of what to say, I thought anything I could say would not serve to comfort him, but most likely anger him. If I had spoken, I would have reminded him that he’d been trying this for years.

  “I’m likely gonna go get him in a coupl’a days.” He lit a cigarette and stared at the beam of light cutting a thin, angular line in the darkness on the floor at the top of the stairs.“That is, if they still think it’s the right thing when I go back. You wanna go with me?”

  “Maybe so,”I said, knowing that it was about as likely that I would as Percy would come home and act normal. Neither Sharon nor I had started back to school; I was seeing her in the afternoons and the evenings when she didn’t work. The two times I’d been to see him myself, had been when I couldn’t see her.

  He rubbed his face with his hands, then nodded then shook his head, as if both gestures made some sense. He appeared to be listening again like he thought my mother might be stirring downstairs once more.

  Two days later, he’d pull into the driveway with Percy, sitting proud in the front seat, once more. Waltzed in with him, down the same path he’d been coerced that night less than three weeks before. First, though, leaving Percy in the car, he’d made his way into to find my mother, speak with her about what he’d done, because he, it was fairly obvious, previously had not. It was one of the few times I could remember hearing my mother’s voice raised. Her questions, I believed he’d say later or at least try to convince himself, were the same ones he’d asked.