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

by Trey Holt

  I nodded, knowing that it mattered little how much we talked about it: what had happened, or exactly what had happened, would never be known. It would never be known if my uncle had finally gone over the edge that would transform him, in the collective eyes of Franklin, from a nuisance to a danger or whether he had been drawn into something that he did not understand. I think he had been so used to seeing people look at him with sideways glances and suspicious, incredulous eyes, that probably any positive attention from a stranger would have been interpreted kindly. Especially when he had been removed from the only family he knew a few days ago and the stranger was Ms. Nedler.

  “So…do you think he meant her any harm?” Jean asked me.

  Before I could even consider her question, come up with an answer that made sense, a voice almost not my own came from inside me. Spoke itself.“Harm? What’s harm? Do we ever really know?”

  She looked at me like she thought I was as crazy as my uncle had been.

  “So why do you think he was lookin’in her winda’?” she asked. She said the word just like our daddy, downstairs and I was certain drunk as he could be by now. He’d lived on the bottle since Monday, worn it like armor to protect himself.

  “I don’t fuckin’know,”I said, before I got a handle on my words.“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  I looked at his bed, the one he had slept in just a few days before. The one that had been Jean’s before it was his, before she reached the status of princess and he reached the designation of my chronically crazy uncle. It looked as if it were ready for him. I doubted that the sheets had even been washed since he was there. Around our house for the last week, life had all but stopped, first with his absence and then with the call that would come on Monday.

  The tears that had been threatening to escape finally did so down Jean’s cheeks. I stood and covered the few steps to the chest of drawers and handed her a handkerchief I never used anyway. She blotted at her eyes and gave me an awkward hug, the kind that asks you not to notice tears as they fall.

  “I guess there’s just some things we’ll never know,”I told her.

  All I really did know was that we had seen him that night, looking like someone whose death had been in the water. His body and especially his face, thick with the makeup George Preston had applied, appeared to have that quality that they had been saturated with the substance that naturally fills the river. Gathered as much of what had taken his life as possible, held it so closely it would not leave. His face appeared almost not his own. As I stood at the side of the casket and pressed my arm across Jean’s back for the first time I could remember in years, I tried to figure whether it was the bloat or the semi-peaceful expression that made him not look like himself. Or perhaps it had been the suit that Lucky had gone to Pigg’s Menswear and gotten for him that had made him look unlike himself. His legs, underneath the closed section of the coffin, I knew, were covered in britches not hemmed for time's sake. Lucky had told Mr. Pigg that would have to do then choked back sobs with his free hand before disappearing to the bedroom.

  “You could tell there was bruises under that makeup,”said Jean, who either hadn’t noticed I was smoking…or didn’t care. I thought about death had its own way of calling quickly into question our priorities.

  “Yeah, I heard George Preston tellin’Daddy that he had done the best he could. He said it was right on the line of bein’a case where they closed the casket. He said he made him look as good as possible.”

  “All things considered,”said Jean as she walked to the window, looked out at the Smithson’s house,“I guess he looked pretty good.”

  As I stared at her back, her wavy blonde hair, crimped and tamed so that every one was in place, I had to wonder what was to be considered. What were all things?

  “Did you hear that Nedler hit him?” I said.

  “No…did you?” She sat on the bed again, stretched out her legs and stared at her feet.

  “No,”I said. Rethought it.“Well, yeah. I’ve heard everything in the last few days. From Van…from Tully.”

  “If Daddy....”

  “Yeah, if Daddy....” I said, but didn’t finish.

  The object of our statement went unspoken. Always has and always will, I assume. There are some things Jean and I have carried from the family from which we come that we do indeed continue to carry.

  “I heard that Nedler hit him in the back of the head,”I told her.“That’s what I heard. Saw him tryin’to get in the front door and his wife yellin’and he hit him in the back of his head with his fist and then called Lucky. That’s what I heard. I heard that when he appeared on the end of Everbright, headed toward his house, Mrs. Nedler started hollerin’that she wanted Percy out’a her yard. Supposedly, he fell down after Nedler hit him one time and just huddled there in a ball till Lucky got there.”

  How information like this passed from person to person, I did not know. I only knew that it was again a quality of language that somehow, as Percy had suggested, fell short of correctly or accurately conveying reality. I also knew that it had been passed from person to person and could have been so diluted by the time I heard it that it could no longer even be called real information. These were just words now. Possibly as empty as I felt. As empty as life seemed in this moment.

  “He just hit him once?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “What about all them br—?” but then she quit, not liking, I assumed, the answer she quickly concluded.

  “That’s what I heard. But like I said, I’m not sure we’ll ever know exactly what happened.” I crushed my cigarette out in the ashtray by the bed, the one that had been placed upstairs years ago for Percy, after a long battle about him smoking up there. He had finally won, convincing Lucky he was no more likely to burn the house down than Lucky himself was. He was not a drinker, Percy had finally told him, and was much less likely to fall asleep accidentally.

  “You think he got all them bruises in the river? I mean, after he went in…was took…I mean, taken by the current?”

  I looked into her eyes again, once more concluding they were my mother’s eyes. They were open wide in their corners, the broad whites suggesting she expected an answer.

  “I don’t know,”I told her.“Like I said, I imagine there’s just some things we’ll never know.” I lit another cigarette and diverted my eyes out the window, staring at some tar patching on the Smithson’s roof under the faint glow of a close-by street light.

  “But if he didn’t get them in the river and he didn’t get them from Mr. Nedler, then...”

  “You know better than that,”I told her, and felt for the first time I was protecting her from the truth. Somehow I now felt responsible to do so.

  I am unsure if she actually knew better than that. Although she did mention it twice more as we sat on the bed in the suffocating heat of that attic that night in September of 1953, after this night, she never alluded again to the possibility of anything we did not know having happened to Percy. Although his name was mentioned often between us over the years, and still is on occasion, what happened to him was never again discussed. Like so many things involved with living in this world, to the mystery we deferred and ultimately defaulted.

  As we sat there for another hour that evening, knowing that the following day, as was the custom in our part of the country, we would again see his body and the morning following that, bury him, I could not tell you what else we spoke about. Perhaps, we spoke about the things that seem to matter when you’re seventeen and eighteen, how the world in all its possibilities, even in the worst of times, seems to be calling you forward, whispering those secrets that only you and it know. For those brief years that childhood and the struggle of adolescence is behind you and adulthood has yet to fully come upon you, the promise of dreams and the perfect world we’d like to believe in seems just within our grasp. For the most part, we are not old enough to take the potential consequences of our decisions seriously, nor have we experienced enough sorrow to rea
lize that as often as not life comes to its own conclusions, far outside the boundaries of wishes. Our course, it seems, is still charted, not measured.

  The times in that evening when she did come back to the question she had quickly and efficiently avoided earlier, she once more focused her eyes on mine, perhaps more deeply than we had looked at each other in a long time, the same eyes searching mine for the more honest answer past the tone and content of the words I spoke.

  “Wonder what happened to him?” she said suddenly, changing the direction of whatever we were speaking about at the time.“I bet them branches in the water caused them bruises on his face. I bet that was it.”

  I nodded in response to her statement, as if I agreed with her. I recalled hearing Lucky speaking with Dr. Guppy after they had found Percy on Monday, saying that the bruising had to come before the drowning for some reason I didn’t understand. Lucky had acted as if he didn’t either, his eyes turning to the floor.

  “But he did die of drownin’?” Lucky had asked.

  Guppy had nodded and said nothing further.

  “Maybe the current knocked him up against things as he was goin’down the river,”Jean said, like my eyes had betrayed me during my last agreement.

  “Maybe so,”I nodded again.“Maybe so.”

  Again, I wanted to tell her that what I had come to believe over the last year or so of my life, and especially the last week of days, was that there are things that we neither understand nor can fathom, and of those things we must trust somehow that they do…or at least will someday make sense. Randomness…The Planned nature of Things…Basic Human Frailty. I wanted to tell her about these things, at least what I understood about them at seventeen, of which I know only a little more now.

  Accordingly, I did not want to tell her what I believed to be true about Percy’s death, partly because for the first time that I could recall, I felt the need to protect her from something, and partly because I did not want to admit to myself that I believed it.

  Perhaps it was not that my father was a worst man than others I have known. And, in some ways, I would argue, and believe, that he was better. He was, I believe, loyal almost to a fault. Loyal until anger rather than removal overtook him. It wasn’t that he did not care; it was almost as if he cared too deeply. I, though, am not creating an apologetic for him and his ways, and neither am I apologizing for him. Somehow that person that seems to lurk inside all of us, that person who represents the worst of us, the worst of humanity, often seemed utterly apparent in him, as if it lived a bit closer to the surface than in most people. Nevertheless, perhaps none of us wants to believe that we have that person inside us. It seems very seldom that we come into true contact; I believe many of us go a lifetime and are never faced with the cold, hard reality of what we’re capable of.

  + + +

  “It ain’t comin’as high as I thought it might,”he told me, his eyes set hard on the river, still ten or so feet out of its banks.

  I had to remind myself it was not September, that that month, those happenings had been three months and a strange lifetime ago. It was now December, a Saturday in December, six days before Christmas.

  “No sir,”I agreed. The day and a half of rain that had come in the last two had served only to keep the river at its current level, not deepen it.

  Though I had not turned, I knew it to be him by his voice, the sound of his legs and feet now moving through the brush and weeds behind me. He found a dry rock to sit on a couple of feet away. Lit a cigarette.

  “There never will be nothin’here,”he observed.

  “No sir…bottomland,”I said, showing him that I remembered what he’d said.

  “The road can stay open,”he told me.

  I nodded.

  “You know why I was up when you left this mornin’, don’t ya?” he asked. He studied the cigarette in his hand and flipped ashes at the wet weeds around his boot. It was unusually warm for December in Tennessee, mid-fifties.

  I shook my head.

  “‘Cause I’d been at the jail most a’the night. We got so many people in there, I’m afraid to leave just one patrolman there.“I been thinkin’about sendin’some of‘em to county. I don’t know what I’d done if I’d had to keep Jackson and Arliss Mosby there. Hell, they shouldn’t never have been there in the first place. That’s twice I ain’t done right by that family. I should’a just shot Sammy Samuels when he done that Arliss all them years ago.”

  Again, I nodded, neglecting to tell him that I too had served the Mosby’s, particularly Jackson, a bad turn, protecting my own ass.

  “It looks like two of‘em are gonna turn state’s evidence,”he said.“We found one weapon in the house. I got Don Walton and a crew a’men drainin’the outhouse right now. They say there might be another knife in there. I guess the fact that I got him doin’that job goes to show ya ever’once in awhile it’s good to be somebody’s boss.”

  I laughed, hollow as it left my chest. Again, nodded.

  “You know why I remembered that case?” he asked me.

  “No sir.”

  “‘Cause in September I went down there and looked through the records, wantin’to believe that somethin’like that happened to Percy. Ain’t that a hell of a note? Hopin’somethin’like that might’a happened to your own brother? At the time…even now…it just seems like it might have been better than what happened.”

  I wanted to ask a blue million questions but did not.

  “You know, he called from somewhere that mornin’and talked to Mary. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Son of a bitch said he was goin’to the river. That’s all he said.‘Tell Dillard I’m goin’to the river.’That’s all he said. He must’a just walked in.”

  This was the extent to which my father and I would ever speak about Percy’s death, after the death of Rosa Mary Dean and the subsequent capture and arrest of her killers. As the years have passed, though, that is not what I most prominently remember from that day at the river, that last Saturday before Christmas in 1953.

  “Where’s your class ring?” he asked me, his eyes focused on my right ring finger, where it had been placed for a year before I gave it to Sharon.

  I started to lie, but then thought better of it.“A girl’s got it.”

  “I figured as much,”he said. He lit another cigarette then crimped his lips around the end of his tongue and made a spitting noise.“I ain’t stupid. I figure you been doin’somethin’every mornin’.”

  “I might marry her,”I said.

  “A family life’s the best life you can have,”he said. He offered me a cigarette from the pack he hadn’t put back in his pocket yet. I took one and lit it, drew deep and felt the calm that first comes when nicotine hits your bloodstream.

  For what seemed like a long time, we sat still and in silence before he spoke again.“I got somethin’wrong with my lungs,”he said.“A few weeks ago, Guppy sent me down to Vanderbilt and they said I got what they call emphysema. I think I’m sayin’that right. Whatever it’s called, it’s where your lungs don’t work right no more. They don’t take in air and push it out right.”

  In the day it was, even though his symptoms had been fairly apparent for awhile, I believe I would have been less surprised if he had slapped me in the back of the head with his pistol.

  “Do you remember that spat that you an’me got in back in May?” he asked me.

  I did not remember a spat. I remembered him, as he had done many times, allowing himself to become outside his own control and kick me in the ass after he had pushed me down. I nodded anyway.

  “I went to see Guppy after that. Hell, it was the first time I’d been to the doctor in ten years. He wanted me to go to Vanderbilt to see a lung doctor. Then I put that off and put that off until I knew I had to. They told me what I’m tellin’you a coupl’a weeks ago. I ain’t even told your mama. Not Jean. Nobody. I’d appreciate you not tellin’nobody.”

  “All right,”I told him. I wondered
why he’d told me. As with most things, I had no answer.

  “Guppy tells me if I quit smokin’then it’s likely it’ll be all right or at least won’t get no worse. But it’s funny, I can’t bear the thought. Ain’t that funny, how we can love somethin’more than life itself? Not just your own…but anybody’s?”

  Once more, and the last time of the day, I answered silently by nodding. Then, as I’d done all those years before when Lucky had taught me to skip rocks, and probably had not done since, I laid my head on his shoulder and just sat and listened to the silent sounds of the river moving slowly by. Invisibly by.

  Epilogue

  The accused in the Rosa Mary Dean case would go to trial in January of 1954. The Franklin Courthouse was packed to overflow each and every day. Van and Tully skipped school one day to go, saying that they knew if they got caught there wouldn’t be anything that happened to them; I declined the offer when Van came to my house and asked if I wanted to join them. And even though Lucky spoke of it little, Fred Creason wrote about it each time the Review Appeal was published, as he had done when Bette Burgess and Sherman Burgess and Fred Burkitt and Bobby Bishop and Miss Mary Ivey were charged. The only two arrested that were not charged, besides Jackson and Arliss Mosby, were Robert Smith and Louis Woodson, whom I’ve always assumed Lucky and John Hendricks, the county prosecutor, believed to have nothing further to do with the matter than they simply living in the house where it took place.

  As for the information that would come to the surface in the trial itself, it was mostly as Lucky had theorized: that this woman, Rosa Mary Opinsky Dean, had come to Franklin to extort money from Bette Burgess, knowing that she had been involved in the murder of Mrs. Sallie Golden, which John Golden was already doing life for. He had refused to implicate Bette, a woman with whom he’d been having an affair for years. Although it was never known exactly how she knew of the murder of Sallie Golden and its details and participants, it was an accepted fact corroborated by the Beatty’s that she had been there in 1949. Of course, Bette Burgess never admitted her involvement in either of these murders, as she stated to the end that she had never seen this woman who had been found at the high school early the morning of December 13th and had no reason to know her. Her son, Sherman, stated the same. The saving grace, if you can call it that, of the prosecuting case came at the hands of one Fred Burkitt, who turned state’s evidence for immunity. As a result, the story that most everyone has believed to be true, including myself, came to light.