The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Even though it was bare November, it was still mild weather in midday, and Taw insisted that the pair of them go fishing, in celebration of their newly resurrected youth. Tavy didn't look too keen on the idea, but finally he shrugged and went along, as he always did in the old days.

  With a trunkful of fishing rods and tackle pulled down from the smokehouse, they had set off in Taw's new Mercury, talking about old

  times as they headed through the valley toward their fishing hole.

  "Houses look about the same," Taw said, watching the well-remembered landscape slip past him.

  "New people in a lot of 'em, though," Tavy told him. "I reckon the Tilden place will be up for sale again soon. It sold last year to some folks called Underhill. He was retired military. Had a wife and a passel of teenagers. They kept to themselves, though."

  "He's gonna farm the Tilden place? Cattle?"

  "He's not going to be farming anywhere," said Tavy. "I'm surprised you haven't heard about it. A few weeks back, the Underhills' oldest boy took a rifle and killed his parents and little brother before he blew his own head off. The other two teenagers survived, but I doubt if they can make a go of the farm. Don't see why they'd want to live there, anyhow."

  "There's no luck in that place," said Taw. "The Tildens never made much out of it, as I recall. Wore themselves out trying. Did these new people fix up the old farmhouse?"

  "It's been done piecemeal through the years. You wouldn't know it from the old days. Don't reckon I'd want to live there, anyhow, not if it was a palace and they was giving it away."

  Taw lost interest in the Underhills. "How's Wake High doing in football this year? Do we still play Johnson City?"

  At a crossroads where a rusted Coca-Cola sign marked the ruins of an abandoned store, Taw slowed the car, and turned down the gravel

  road that led past the Tilden farm and onto their fishing spot by the river bend. They parked in a clearing under a grove of locust trees and followed the well-worn path to the river.

  Taw took a deep breath of mountain air. "Some things don't change!" he sighed.

  Tavy Annis looked at the ground. "Most things do." He stepped back and watched his friend step out of the brush to reacquaint himself with the waters of his youth.

  Taw McBryde stood for a long time staring at the flow of earth-colored sludge that was the Little Dove River. It broke over the rocks in brown waves like tobacco spittle that trickled down the encrusted boulders. "I wouldn't a knowed it," he said, slipping back into the speech patterns of his youth.

  Tavy sat down on a boulder near the water's edge, and began to rig up his fishing line. "It's that paper company over in North Carolina," he said. "They been dumping poison chemicals in that river for a lot of years now, and we're downstream from them."

  Taw couldn't take his eyes off the river. "And there's still fish living in that?"

  "Some." Tavy nodded. "If we catch any, we'd best throw them back, though. That's why I didn't bother about a fishing license when you said you wanted to come. Game warden says you can't eat 'em. Don't think anybody would, unless they was half-starved. I caught one once."

  "Trout?"

  Tavy Annis shrugged, staring out at the river. 86

  "Maybe. It had warts growing all over its head, and its eyes were white. I didn't even want to touch it to throw it back. I cut my line and kicked it back in the river, tackle and all."

  "There's laws," said Taw McBryde. "Environmental protection. The government won't let you dump filth into rivers anymore."

  "I believe they've cut back on the dumping some," Tavy agreed, "But it's been polluted a long time, and it's not getting any better. The people at the hospital swear some of the illness around here is caused by that damned river. But they say that since we're in Tennessee and the paper company is in North Carolina, there isn't a lot we can do to stop it."

  Taw made no move to get out his fishing tackle. "I don't reckon even them gold railroad watches could'a lasted through this," he said.

  Maggie Underhill slammed her schoolbooks down on the table in the front hall and thrust her fist into her mouth to stifle her cry. "I'm home!" It was an automatic gesture, hard to suspend now that there was no one to notify of her comings and goings. Mark was outside, putting the car in the garage. They had hardly spoken a word on the way home.

  School seemed to last an eternity these days. They had decided to go back the day after the funeral, because there didn't seem to be much point in sitting around the house staring at nothing, contributing to the silence. At least school would offer a distraction, they had reasoned.

  Maggie had foreseen the clumsy attempts at advice and consolation that would be thrust at them by teachers and well-meaning friends, and she felt nothing at all as she sat there, murmuring thanks for their concern. She had been less prepared for the cruelty flung at them by the thoughtless and the malicious. Purring sympathy, some of her former friends had pressed her for details about the deaths, insisting that it would do her good to talk about it. Others had jeered that maybe all the Underhills were crazy, and in heavy-handed lunchroom jests, they warned each other to steer clear of Mad Maggie.

  When the teasing or the prying concern began, she would excuse herself from the group with icy calmness, and then retreat to the bathroom, where she would huddle in the pink metal stall, weeping silently.

  Mark seemed less affected by the reactions of his schoolmates to the family tragedy. He ignored the sympathizers just as steadfastly as he did the bullies, sailing past them with an unconcern that was more disinterest than disdain. In the week since the deaths he had said nothing of it to anyone. Not even to her. Both the sheriff and the school guidance counselor had suggested that they seek grief therapy in Johnson City, but Mark had politely refused for both of them. They could manage perfectly well, he insisted. He hadn't asked if she had wanted to go; hadn't cared. She had never really been close to Mark, despite—or perhaps because of— their closeness in age.

  Maggie started up the stairway, past a gauntlet of family pictures hung in the stairwell, tracing the Underhill children from babyhood until the present. There was Josh in a cowboy hat, grinning toothlessly at a stuffed bear: Fort Sill, 1972, and Daddy was a first lieutenant. Above that was a framed wedding portrait of Mother and Daddy, 1969. Mother had long, straight hair that suited the era, but looked out of place with the beige suit she'd worn at her wedding. She looked very solemn, clutching her bouquet and staring slightly openmouthed at the camera. Beside her, 2d Lt. Paul Underhill, with a razored crew cut and crisp dress greens, eyed the camera with a winner's grin. Mark and Maggie were white-gowned infants in the first tier of pictures, gradually progressing to toddlers and well-groomed adolescents as one ascended the stairwell gallery. Simon appeared midway in the family history, a rosy blond baby in the same christening gown in 1983: Dad, a newly promoted major at Fort McPherson. Simon took up an increasing amount of space as a winsome toddler, much cuter than his sullen adolescent siblings. She tried to summon up an emotion that could be called missing Simon, but nothing would come.

  Maggie stared for a moment at the progression of photographs, wondering if she could put out a finger, touch one, and say, "There. There is the time that things went wrong." But she couldn't. The good and bad times had a way of sliding in and out, so that you couldn't really separate them into two piles.

  As she looked at the swirl of familiar faces, already receding to snapshots in her mind, one feeling came unbidden to the orphaned Maggie Underhill. Above everything else, she missed Josh.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ril Sams climbed Hanlon with his hounds last night, but when they winded something below the top, and wouldn't go beyond the lantern light, and trembled on the lead, then he came home. I trust the hounds; they know what made them stop, what waits there in the mist on Hanlon's top.

  —JIM WAYNE MILLER,

  "Hanlon Mountain in Mist"

  Taw McBryde remembered the Dixie Grill from his youth, and although the food did not equal
his rapturous recollections of it, he continued to eat there a couple of times a week. Maybe nothing was as good as he'd remembered it being, he told himself. Memory is a selective thing, and an eighteen-year-old's appetite and lack of sophistication could account for much of the cafe's former glory.

  He sat in the back booth, farthest from the jukebox, and studied the typed menu of "Today's Specials" while he waited for Tavy to show up. He had about decided on the $3.25 all-vegetable plate (mashed potatoes, green beans, stewed tomatoes, and fried apples) when a shadow fell across the page. Taw looked up over his reading glasses, and saw his dinner companion looming above him. He smiled and started to say hello when he saw Tavy's gray face and drawn features, staring at nothing. Taw's grin faded, and he gripped his friend's arm, pulling him into the booth.

  "Tavy!" he whispered. "It's not your heart, is it? You look god-awful."

  "Don't call the doctor, Taw. I already been today. And, no, it ain't my heart."

  Taw set aside his menu, his appetite gone. "Tell me."

  Tavy picked up the glass of water beside his place setting and poured it out across the polished pine tabletop, watching impassively as Taw grabbed napkins and tried to stem the tide rolling toward his lap. "What the hell's wrong with you, Tavy?" he demanded, sopping water and ice cubes away from the table's edge.

  "Cancer."

  Taw stopped mopping, and stared openmouthed at his friend, oblivious to the trickle of water dripping onto his khaki work pants. "What?"

  "Thought it was an ulcer," said Tavy, tracing circles in the wetness. "I'd been feeling poorly. Having some pains in my gut. So I went to the clinic in Johnson City to have it checked. They called me in today to tell me the results. They won't tell you news like that over the phone." He smiled bitterly. "Maybe they think you'll kill yourself. As if it mattered. It's in my liver, Taw, and spreading out from there. There ain't a damn thing they can do about it."

  Taw heard all the words clear as day, but he couldn't seem to string them together to get any sense out of them. He looked at the gray man in the shiny blue suit who sat across from him, and thought that somewhere trapped inside that husk was little Tavy Annis, a towheaded kid with a possum-skin banjo and an unbroken yardage record for quarterbacks at Hamelin

  High. The boy mechanic who could fix any car with a wrench and a screwdriver. What was he on about now?

  "You're sick?" Taw said stupidly.

  "No. I reckon I'm dead. They laid it all out for me: the odds, the expense, and the methods of treatment, which they as good as said wouldn't do no good. And I told them they could keep their pills; I was going home. But that ain't the hell of it, Taw. You know what else the doctor said?"

  "What?" The words spun past Taw's head, and before he could seize one topic, Tavy was on to the next one.

  "The doctor—some kid in a white coat; couldn't have been more than twenty-eight, twenty-nine—looked at my chart, and he says, 'I see you're from Dark Hollow over in Wake County. That's near the Little Dove River, isn't it?' I allowed as how it was, but so what?"

  "The doctor asked you about the river?"

  "Yeah. And then he starts talking about what a damned shame it is that the Titan Paper Company over in North Carolina isn't made to stop dumping pollutants into the Little Dove River. He said the cancer rate downstream from that plant—here in east Tennessee—is ten times the national average." Tavy let his hand fall limp in the pool of clear water on the table, and silent tears rolled down the furrows in his cheeks. "Taw, that damned river got me, just like it poisoned all the fish."

  Taw stared at his friend, seizing on something to focus on besides the grief and horror.

  "Somebody better let those people at the factory know," he whispered.

  Tavy Annis shook his head. "They already know all about it. Their lawyers have been fighting the cleanup orders for years."

  Laura Bruce clutched the telephone receiver as if it were a human hand. "I can hear you fine, honey," she said again. "It's hard to believe you're half a world away. Are you getting my letters?"

  Her eyes strayed to Will Bruce's clear blue eyes staring back at her from the photograph on her nightstand. She smiled at the image, as his voice flowed into her from another continent. She was propped up in bed on both pillows, cradling the headset against her neck, and resting her other hand on the small swollen mound beneath her cotton nightgown. "We're fine, Will. Both of us. I go back to the doctor in three weeks. How are things over there? Are you eating all right?"

  Soon he would ask her about things in the parish. Should she tell him about the Underbills, or would that only add to his burden? She decided to listen to his news first, try to gauge his mood, before she told him about the tragedy.

  Will Bruce's soft Southern voice rumbled through the phone lines. "I don't know, Laura. I'm stuck out here in the desert. I guess I feel like St. Augustine."

  "That sounds good," said Laura, puzzled by the weariness in his voice.

  He laughed. "Think again, pagan! Augustine had a major crisis out here in the desert. Wondered if his faith was worth a damn. This desolate country will do it to you. I sure wish I was back in the green hills of Tennessee."

  "I wish you were, too, Will. But I guess the soldiers out there need you."

  "Not so's you'd notice it. I'm not exactly in high demand. Every now and then somebody will drop by to try to scare up an argument on abortion, or ask me if I'm one of those crackpot kind of preachers who doesn't believe in evolution and who takes the last dimes from little old ladies' pension funds to buy myself a BMW. These kids think they're too young and too American to die. What do they need me for?"

  Laura closed her eyes. / don't need this, she thought. I'm doing your damned job here, Will. Don't make me minister to you as well. She said, "You sound tired, honey. I bet you're pushing yourself too hard. What if I send you some iron tablets?"

  "I'd rather have a box of Goo Goo clusters. And Doritos. How's everything back in Dark Hollow? I bet it's beautiful there with the leaves turning."

  "Wonderful," said Laura. "Prettiest place on earth." The leaves had been on the ground for two weeks now. "Everything is fine, Will."

  The headlights did not quite reach into the darkness. Maggie Underhill had to lean forward and strain to see the curves in the road that always seemed just beyond the pool of

  light. She glanced at Mark, slumped in the seat beside her, and thought for a moment about waking him up and asking him to navigate, but she decided against it. If the alcohol was beginning to wear off, he might insist on driving, which might be worse to endure than the blinding dark. Play practice had been long and tedious, and Maggie was exhausted. Better to let Mark sleep and enjoy the silence.

  Bare tree branches were thrust across the road like pitchforks, waving slowly in the wind.

  In summer this country road was beautiful. She knew that because they had moved onto the farm in May, and she remembered seeing its green splendor in the months that followed, but now she could not call to mind the image of the tree-lined blacktop ringed by purple chicory flowers in the waist-high grass.

  Now, in the headlights, there was no trace of color in the landscape. Did the grass have a tinge of green, or did she will it to look that way by knowing how grass was supposed to look? There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Maggie had intended to practice her part on the way home, but it was late now, and the road was difficult. Perhaps Mark would rehearse with her tomorrow out in the barn. Laertes and Ophelia: brother and sister. She thought that was why she had been given the part, because Mark was such a strong character that he must be Laertes; she had been given Ophelia for poetic justice. Or because she was pretty, with her waist-long dark hair, and her big dark eyes.

  They didn't seem to mind that her voice was inaudible. . . .

  Farther along, two red circles seemed to follow the slant of the road, taillights of a distant car—white and squarish, barely visible—an old car, Maggie thought. It seemed to pace itself, staying just beyond the flash of h
er lights, as if in light it would be no longer visible. It is my parents, Maggie thought. They are driving this road before I was born. Father's hands will be fists around the steering wheel, and Mother will be very quiet, looking away into the distance.

  The old car stopped at an unmarked crossroad. Its taillights winked at her for a moment, and then it slid silently up the road and into the trees. It had nearly disappeared from sight before Maggie remembered that there was no need to practice in the barn tomorrow. They could shout from the housetop, and no one would hear. Mother and Daddy were under the earth in Oakdale. The house would be dark and silent when they reached it. Unless the red taillights in the distance were Mother and Daddy and Simon and Joshua coming back home from Oakdale. Coming back to see their little Markie and Maggie-May.

  Maggie waited for long minutes at the crossroads, looking left and right into the darkness, until she thought it was safe to go on.

  The sheriff's office was officially closed for the night. At the dispatcher's table, the telephone had been set to forward calls to the next county, where a full-time staff of law enforcement peo-

  pie answered any late-night emergencies in Wake County. They were seldom summoned. An occasional wreck or a domestic squabble was the most trouble anybody made in Hamelin after midnight. Spencer Arrowood could have gone home hours ago, but he had lingered long after LeDonne and Martha left the office, turning down their invitation to a spaghetti supper with the ever-plausible plea of paperwork to be finished. He didn't want to spend an evening with them talking shop, rehashing the Underbill case. LeDonne wanted to talk about the dead rabbit they had found at the scene, but what did it matter? Josh Underhill was as dead as his victims. They would never really know why.

  Even with only part of his mind devoted to routine tasks, he had managed to finish all the pressing bureaucratic business by ten o'clock. Since then he had been attempting to write a letter.