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

by Trey Holt

  “You remember me tellin’you that the Ivey woman was still alive, don’t ya? That I talked to her when I was over there?”

  “Yessir,”I told him.”You said you talked to most a’the boarders there. Bobby Bishop and Fred Burkitt, too.”

  “That Fred Burkitt’s a sad sight,”Lucky said, something akin to what he always did when he was mentioned. He turned the squad car on Strahl Street then held his hand over the top of the car for a right turn into Evans Alley.“I guess it’s just about quit rainin’. I bet with the snow that come first though, and as hard as long as it rained, the river’ll be out.”

  I nodded as he slowed the car in front of the Burgess house.

  Lucky, as he most usually did, parked the car and sat silent in it for a few minutes before going in on a call like this. Perhaps he was thinking through what he was to say or do, I imagined, the situation itself, the ways it could go. He looked at some of the papers he had collected in his office and nodded, like a conversation was playing out in the privacy of his head. He tilted back the brim of his hat and looked at himself in the mirror then snuffed out the cigarette that had almost burned down to his fingertips.

  When we entered the Burgess house, we did so without a knock, because most people came and went that way, I had always been told. Having rooms for six people besides herself and her family members, which now only consisted of one son named Sherman, most of the people who lived in the place were people who could find no where else to live. White people who had been driven a peg below just the“mixed”part of town, to the boarding house in the“mixed”part of town. The derelicts, the bootleg runners, people like Miss Ivey, who either sold or gave her body away on a regular basis, people whose drink ruled their life, whose history rendered them powerless and some almost lifeless.

  Upon first entering the room, I began to look for Bobby Bishop, who I imagined would be here if he had not in fact moved home with Sharon’s mother in the last couple of days. Nevertheless, he was no where to be seen, but probably down in Alabama picking up shine. According to Sharon, he was experiencing having a growing rift with the Bennings down in Little Texas about running shine up from Alabama and losing them business. The Burgess woman, who ran this house, was a direct descendant of theirs, having taken the name Burgess with marriage.

  In the room, though, was Miss Ivey, wearing her characteristic riding pants and a blouse cut low enough to show half her bosom. Next to her, getting a light off her cigarette, was Robert Woodson, long time resident of the house and somebody Lucky had always referred to as a“derelict,”different from“drunk,”which was what he often called Louis Smith. He was the finest house painter in Franklin at one time, Lucky had told me, until the bottle completely took him over and made him shake so bad that he couldn’t paint when he wasn’t drinking. When he was drinking, he couldn’t keep the amount of intoxicant to a level with which he could remain functional, so demonstrated by a call Lucky had to go to when he had fallen off a ladder and broken an arm and a leg. The other current inhabitant of the house wasn’t in the main room, one Fred Burkitt.

  It took Ms. Burgess a few moments to come out of her and her son’s part of the house, once we had entered the main lobby-like room. She was a silver-haired woman who appeared in her mid- fifties. The only times I had ever laid eyes on her before was in the grocery store in town. She nodded at Lucky and motioned for him to take a seat in the only empty chair. Ignored me.

  “No thank ya,”said Lucky,“we ain’t gonna be stayin’but a few minutes.”

  “Suit yourself,”she told him.

  “Howdy, Louis…howdy, Robert,”Lucky said.“Hey, Miss Ivey.”

  They all nodded back; Louis Smith tried to raise himself to shake Lucky’s hand, but lost a handle on his balance about half way up and sat back down in the chair.

  “It’s all right,”Lucky said.“Just keep your seat, Louis. Looks like you’ve already had a few.”

  “Sober as a judge,”said Louis, half-smiling, offering his hand from his seat.

  Robert Woodson, a smaller and stockier man, drew a couple of hostile puffs off his cigarette and nodded at Lucky, then removed himself to the farside of the room by the door. Mrs. Burgess stepped to the couch but did not sit.

  “The other boys not here?” Lucky asked.

  “I can’t keep up with everybody that lives here,”said Mrs. Burgess.

  “Yeah,”Lucky said, nodding, looking at the floor.“Yeah, I understand that.”

  “So what brings the pleasure of your visit?” said Bette Burgess.

  “I think I will sit down,”said Lucky. He sat on the slick, green sofa and pulled out his cigarettes. He knocked one out and lit it, offered anybody else one who would have it. Hacked a couple of times.

  “That cough sounds bad,”said Louis.“Real bad.”

  “Yeah, it’s been a hard winter so far,”said Lucky.“Y’all know my boy, Henry, here, don’t ya? With all that’s goin’on, I been pretty short-handed. He’s helpin’me out for a few days.”

  Louis Smith again tried to raise himself from his seat, but stopped quicker this time and returned his weight to the chair in which he sat. Robert Woodson spoke my name and gave a slight wave. Mary Ivey asked me if I knew Van. I nodded, as it took a moment to sink in why he might know her. Later he would tell me he’d“given her a couple of rides.”

  “Well,”Lucky finally said,“Mrs. Burgess…or is it all right if I call you Bette?”

  She nodded.

  “You remember when I was here the other day, right? Came because some people thought that woman…you know, the one they found up by the high school, might be Miss Ivey here. And I’m sure you remember I asked you about a window, then I had some boys come in here and take a few samples from around it. Fingerprints and some places that looked like blood. If I remember right, they did it in that room, correct?” Lucky pointed toward the next room of the house, the part that was private to Bette and her son Sherman.

  Bette nodded again.“Yeah, and you remember what I told you, too, don’t ya?”

  Lucky nodded himself, drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out quick.“Yes ma’am, I do. You said that your boy, Sherman, works at the slaughter house out Carters Creek Pike, which I knew. And if I remember right, you said that they had give him a runt hog to bring home if he wanted to and that he had done the hog in out back and then y’all cleaned part of it in here…the head if I remember right. You said you was mad at him, too, because he wore his clothes in and got more blood inside. And you said, too, that you had had a bloody nose sometime in the last coupl’a weeks and that could’a got in them places we pulled out’a the kitchen. But, you know, Bette, I still got a coupl’a other questions for ya.”

  Mary Ivey shifted her weight from her butt to her legs and then stood. She walked across the room and feigned looking out the window. Bette stared at Lucky with squinted eyes.

  “I’m still wonderin’about that window on the farside of your room in there. You know, it was the one that was so clean…the one that was missin’the curtains.”

  “And you know it’s still just like I told ya when you talked to me and Sherman that mornin’. My grandkids was over here and they pulled it down. Tore it up so bad that there wasn’t no way to fix it. When I took them curtains down, I tried to wash‘em first…not seein’how bad they was tore up. But then I ended up throwin’ ‘em away and that really didn’t leave me no choice but to clean the rest of the space around the winda’pretty good, with it bein’bare and all. You can understand that, can’t ya?”

  “Yes ma’am…that seems to make sense to me,”he said.“My wife said that made sense to her.” Lucky scuffed at the floor with his boot.

  “And did you, Mrs. Burgess…or Bette…ever know the woman that was killed and found at the high school?”

  “You mean the one them niggers kilt?”

  “I mean the one found behind the high school,”said Lucky.

  “I hadn’t never seen her before,”said Louis Smith.“I hadn’t never laid
eyes on her before I seen her at the funeral home.”

  “I told your ass not to go,”came a voice from behind me.

  “I know you did, but I was afraid I might know her. Wasn’t her name Rose Mary or somethin’like that?” At the end of his question, Louis withdrew his bottle from its place under the chair in which he sat and took a quick drink. Offered Lucky one, which he refused.

  “Rosa,”said Fred Burkitt after he pushed the door completely shut.“Rosa Mary Dean, I think. Wasn’t that her name, Police Chief Hall?”

  Lucky turned to look at Fred Burkitt, which always seemed to pain him. I was never certain if it was the absence of Ronnie Langford he saw when he looked at him, Percy or what had happened to Fred himself.

  “Yessir, Fred, that was it…is it. They’re buryin’her tommora’. Hi ya doin’?”

  Fred offered his only hand, his left one, and Lucky shook it. It had been years since he’d worn consistently the contraption that simulated a right arm. He’d told Lucky once that he’d stopped wearing it because he didn’t have enough of a shoulder muscle left to control it. He’d lost the arm so deeply into the socket that he’d have to just learn to live without one. But he was lucky, he’d said, seeing what had happened to Ronnie. He even considered himself lucky that it had been the opposite leg that he’d lost above the knee, so it made it easier to walk with the crutch he carried with him everywhere. With his good hand, he patted the empty space on the couch then took a seat and propped his crutch on the arm. He took the bottle Louis Smith offered him and drained a good drink, then handed it back to him.

  “And Bette…gettin’back to you. Did you know this woman at all?” Lucky asked after Fred, too, had offered him the bottle and he’d declined once more.

  “You know, Mr. Hall, it’s like I told ya the other day, I didn’t know who in the hell she was because I’d never seen her before. That’s the god’s honest truth. I didn’t have no idea who she was or where she come from.”

  “Well, she was from Indianapolis, we believe,”said Lucky.“We know that much. Believe she had been from Pennsylvania before that. We believe she’d been here one time before. Maybe three or four years ago. We’re still tryin’to figure out why she was here.” Lucky pulled his cigarette to his mouth, ashes now longer than cigarette, then searched for an ashtray in which to place it. Finally, he stepped over by Robert Woodson and snuffed it out in the ashtray there.

  “I tol’ya before you sent them other fella’s in here to take them samples that I didn’t know nothin’about her then…and I’m tellin’ya the same thing now. I don’t know why y’all got in your head to pick on me. You come to look and see if Miss Ivey here was okay. You found that out.”

  “Your boy at work?” asked Lucky.

  “Sherman?” she said.

  “Yes ma’am. Sherman.”

  “Yeah, he goes every day.”

  “Out on Carters Creek Pike, right?’said Lucky.

  “Yessir.”

  Lucky paused, lit another cigarette and looked over everyone in the room. Louis Smith had took another draw from his bottle before passing it to Fred. Robert Woodson scowled at Lucky’s profile until I turned my attention to him, when he pretended to be looking out the window. Fred Burkitt now propped himself and his crutch up on the arm of the couch. Mary Ivey arose from her seat, adjusted her pants and blouse and made her way toward the stairs, but stopped at their base.

  “How‘bout any of the rest of ya?” Lucky said.“Any of you ever seen her before the other night…I mean the night she was…put out?”

  “That’s the only time I ever saw her,”said Louis Smith.

  “I’m with him,”said Robert Woodson.

  “Miss Ivey?” Lucky asked.

  Miss Ivey lit a cigarette with shaking hands, then raised it to her mouth and drew from it.“I’ve never seen her.”

  “Me neither,”said Fred Burkitt.

  Mary Ivey dropped her cigarette and scurried to pick it up before it burned the wood floor. Lucky’s eyes followed her hands as she retrieved the cigarette then placed it in her mouth.

  “Hi’you been doin’since what happened to your brother?” Fred Burkitt asked.

  “Yeah, that was bad,”said Robert Woodson.“We sure was sorry to hear that.”

  “I’d forgot that,”said Bette Burgess.“That was just a coupl’a months ago, wasn’t it?”

  Lucky only nodded.“Thank ya for your time,”he said.“I’ll get back with y’all if I know more and it’s important.”

  “You do that,”said Mrs. Burgess.

  “Sheriff, good to see ya,”said Louis Smith as I followed Lucky out the doorway onto the front porch. Before the door closed, Lucky looked once more into the lobby of the rooming house were we’d been and shook his head. As we made our way down the three steps onto the flat of the yard, its grass dry and brown, Lucky dropped the cigarette he’d lit and crushed it out with his foot.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lucky stood as close as he could get to the bank of the river, his hands in his pocket, watching the water move. As the river tended to do from time to time at this bend, it had poured over its natural banks and started making its way toward the road. There was nothing else it could impede or destroy in this area, at least at this time of the year. The nearest house was a mile away; the Confederate Cemetery and the Carnton Mansion, a mile and a half. Lucky’s main concern, I knew, was that the road would become impassible. Still just within the city limits, he had complained for years that this spot was covered by the city.

  As he motioned me from the car where he’d initially asked me to stay, I craned my neck to see if I could see the spot where Tully and I had made our way into the bushes, his grandfather’s car on its roof. I did the same to see if I could spot the place where Sharon and I had been meeting. And as always, wondered where the other spot was. The day Lucky had had to go to claim him, to drag his own brother from the bank and the weeds and brush in which his body was tangled, he had not told any of us where he was going. As he usually did, he took the call and told us in passing that he was going on a call.“Down at the river,”was how he said it, if I remember right. That was all.

  Probably all of us that day, my mother as she worked busily around the kitchen—her way of not thinking about things—and Jean and I as we sat and played cards to pass the time, knew that the call had to do with Percy. Even Lucky, as he arose from his chair and made his way into the kitchen where my mother handed him the phone and told him it was Don Walton, seemed to know. As I have heard people say before—which I must admit had always sounded preposterous to me—the way the phone rang seemed to signal all of us. I guess it would be the truth to say we had all been waiting on the call since late Friday evening, since Lucky had called his sister Nellie and told her that Percy should be coming back to Thompson Station, although he did not go into full detail of what had happened. We had all been waiting since more and more time passed and we did not get a call signaling his arrival. Lucky had then called Wanda Jean and Horace and Lera, to see if Percy had in fact shown up there. But he had not.

  And I must say that I would be dishonest if I said it was all I thought about that evening and the following day as we waited. I, too, thought about my shoulder that had seemingly been ripped from the socket the night before. Had for all practical purposes, although it was still without official diagnoses by Dr. Guppy, ended my football career.

  As I waded through the bushes and the brush, I remembered when I had met Lucky at the station no more than six weeks before and he had brought me in the squad car to almost the same place he stood now. Even though I now felt big enough most of the time, and he appeared sick enough most of the time that I could defend myself from him, I would have laid good odds on an ass-kicking that day. One that I deserved. I had ridden my motorcycle away from school, just left, after Nedler had taken up a paper I had copied a whole test onto after I had finished taking it. I had told him I was writing the test down so I could look over it when I got home, but he was a littl
e too bright to believe me, angrily telling me,“Don’t give me that bull—”and then checking himself. Knowing that I would probably go before the honor council, the normal punishment for such an alleged crime, and knowing that I was as poor a liar as I was a lover, I had called Lucky and told him I was coming to talk to him about something. As for Van and Chester, for this day, they would have to fend for themselves.

  Lucky did not say a word to me that day when I told him; less than a month after that Friday night and with my arm just getting again to the point I could write with it, he simply motioned me out of his office and to the squad car. As we rode down Main Street and then Lewisburg Pike, I thought how it had kind of felt good to be caught by that bastard Nedler, how it had kind of been my final“fuck you,”to him, when I could offer him no other.“That’ll show the bastard,”I had even mumbled under my breath as Lucky and I made our way through the brush that day. I did not realize at the time that the good old Academy would indeed have the last word, as they always seemed to, revoking my scholarship and making me pay for the whole goddam thing. For the cheating, the honor council would place me on probation and make me work a month of Saturdays on the grounds of the school, which I had done during November, freezing my ass off picking up trash and trimming back hedges and shrubs, white-washing fences and bricko-block and scrubbing bleachers.

  Lucky, though, had just sat there long and hard, letting one cigarette burn out between his fingers before he lit another one, taking an occasional slug out of his bottle. Thinking he would eventually speak to me about the evil of my ways, I sat in silence with him, but he did not speak. For a strange eternity we sat there together in the silence created from the absence of our words and I began to think he might tell me what he believed happened to Percy, perhaps what even happened the last night at the jail. But he did not. He did not speak about that Thursday and Friday night in September, nor did he speak about what I had told him that day.