Love Thy Neighbor

by Mark Gilleo

  The main valley of Nelson County started south of Charlottesville and ran like retreating Confederate soldiers until the mountains pinched in on three sides. Sheriff Laskey had seen his county change over the years. Charlottesville, in Albemarle County, was wealthy. The city and its surrounding areas were pollinated with old money that spread generation to generation. Families with prestigious sounding names and the genealogical pedigree to prove them, bought up prime rolling acreage for horse farms and wineries. In the last two decades the good ol’ boys who ruled the roost in Charlottesville had spread their golden wings and started swooping down on Nelson County.

  It started with Wintergreen, a resort for weekend getaways, as if families living in a mansion with a pool and horses needed a place to relax and unwind. With a spa, golf courses, and ski runs, Wintergreen, smack dab in the middle of Nelson County, was a haven for the wealthy and a nightmare for a two-man sheriff office. Rich kids with too much money raced their convertible graduation presents along the winding roads, occasionally wrapping the finest German engineering around hundred-year-old tree trunks. Teenagers high on the designer drug-of-the-year ran across the golf course at night screaming, some of them believing they could fly and flapping their arms as if they were ready to prove their point. Swinger parties were known to occur, the participants some of Charlottesville’s finest citizens who frolicked naked in scenes from Caligula, all in view of their neighbors through soaring glass windows.

  The rest of Nelson County was a different story. Where the encroaching neighbors to the north rode their horses around their vineyards, most Nelson County residents took great pride in cultivating vintage cars in their yards. Dilapidated vehicles without engines, tires, and doors grew easily in some of the most fertile land in the mid-Atlantic.

  The landscape was different in old Nelson County and so was the sheriff’s clientele. The wife who cold-cocked her husband with a frying pan for cheating. The five-man hunting party that managed to get separated and shoot each other in the woods despite perfect weather conditions and broad daylight. The father who beat his son within inches of his life for changing the channel on the satellite television, the one real amenity in their double-wide trailers.

  Sheriff Laskey dealt with them all. In his mind, they were all the same. He knew the law and he loved the Bible, and somewhere between the two he found peace in his job.

  And the peace was about to be ruined.

  For the last half-century, Nelson County had been infamous for one thing. A small meteorological record that is unlikely to be broken unless God reneges on His word and sends Noah back down to work on a second rendition of the Ark.

  In 1969, Hurricane Camille smashed into the Mississippi coast as a full-fledged Category 5 monster. The storm surge was estimated at twenty-five feet with wind gusts topping 200 mph. Entire blocks were wiped clean. Brick apartments were removed from their foundations and swallowed by the sea or blown inland bit by bit. One man purportedly escaped from the attic of his two-story home, barely squeezing out a small window before the house was engulfed by rising water. He lived over a mile from the coast. Still three days away, no one could have guessed the wraith Camille was going to let loose on a small county in central Virginia.

  When the first raindrops started to fall in Nelson County, Sheriff Laskey, who had not yet been voted into his current title, was busy with the tractor in the old red barn behind the family house. As darkness fell, so did larger drops of rain. By the time the radio was crackling out warnings and the TV had issued an emergency broadcast, it was too late to run. Over the next twelve hours, thirty-six inches of rain fell onto Nelson County’s mountains and rolling hills. There were stories of mothers who carried their babies face down so the children wouldn’t drown. A man trapped outside claimed to have survived by burying his mouth in the hollow of a tree to breathe as the storm reached its crescendo. Rain came down in sheets, no longer drops. Laskey gathered his wife and daughter in the hall on the first floor of the farmhouse to pray by candlelight. The shingles on the roof were no match for the relentless downpour and between Psalms and Proverbs, Laskey and his wife hopped from room to room on the second floor, catching drips from the ceiling in pots, pans, and buckets. The rain made noises Laskey had never heard, noises he had never knew were possible. It was as if the house was sitting directly under a waterfall, the long unbroken flow of water relentless.

  Sometime before dawn, as Laskey emptied another bucket into the bathtub on the second floor, he heard the rumble. His wife sat up in bed and called his name as the rumble turned into a crash. Laskey ran downstairs, flung open the door, and looked out over the old porch into the night. He saw nothing beyond the flooded yard, a river where the driveway had once been.

  The crash had lasted thirty seconds before it slowly disappeared into thunder and rain. There was nothing to do but wait.

  Dawn brought little reprieve from the deluge, but by afternoon the word of tragedy had spread to every home with a working phone. The mountains in western Nelson County, drowning in flood waters the country had never seen, had crumbled like mashed potatoes being washed off a dirty plate after supper. Twenty feet of top soil, and everything living on it, had crashed down on the county, swallowing two hundred residents as they slept. Their houses were never found and the official death toll was merely a best guess by emergency workers a week later.

  Now, forty some years later, Nelson County was about to gain notoriety for something non-weather related.

  The phone on Sheriff Laskey’s desk rang, and the sheriff arranged the hat on his head before he leaned forward in his squeaky chair to answer it.

  “Laskey, Nelson County Sheriff’s office,”

  “Sheriff. This is detective Earl Wallace of the D.C. Metropolitan Police.”

  Laskey rocked back in his chair to another squeak. “D.C. police you say?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We don’t get many calls from D.C. down here.”

  Detective Wallace thought about the statement for a second and continued. “I guess not.”

  “What can I help y’all with?”

  Detective Wallace noticed the contraction “y’all,” and wondered just where the geographical line was when the population dropped “you” in favor of the southern extension. “Well, I have a dead body here in D.C. that we pulled out of the river. We ran the prints and found that they belonged to James Beach, a former convict in Petersburg, Virginia.”

  “Petersburg is on the other side of the state,” Sheriff Laskey stated plainly.

  “Yes, sheriff, I know. I already spoke with the assistant warden at Petersburg. I’m interested in locating one of his cellmates at Petersburg. Are you familiar with a Nelson County resident named Jackson Price?”

  Sheriff Laskey nodded to himself as he spoke. “Yeah. I know Jackson Price, all right. Also known as J.P. around here, among other things.”

  “Class citizen?”

  “He’s been on the Nelson County catch and release program for years.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “What don’t I know about him might be a shorter conversation.”

  Detective Wallace laughed. “I’ll take the short version.”

  “Jackson Price came from a fairly wealthy family in Nelson County. His father ran a couple of car dealerships. One in Staunton. One in Charlottesville. One in Lynchburg. He was a good man. Raised two sons by himself after his wife ran off with a doctor from Richmond.”

  “Was a good man?”

  “God rest his soul. Mr. Price passed away, oh, must be eight, ten years ago. Cancer.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well, his sons were nothing but trouble before he passed and their behavior didn’t get any better with their father in the cemetery. The older brother disappeared a few years ago with a couple of warrants on his head, but the Price family still has a home here. Over a hundred acres in southern Nelson County. A nice piece of land. Rolling hills and pastures. They grew apples fo
r a while, until Mr. Price passed and Jackson decided to grow another more profitable crop.”

  “Marijuana.”

  “You got it. Got sent to the big house for cultivation and possession with the intent to distribute.”

  “Have you seen him around?”

  “I’ve seen him a few times since he got out last year. Seems to be staying out of trouble, I guess. No one has called me about anything, if that’s any indication.”

  “Would you mind seeing if you can track him down for me?”

  “You expect he had something to do with the floater?”

  “He may, may not. Just trying to figure out how an ex-con ended up in the Potomac.”

  “J.P. may be a stoner and a rebel, but I doubt he killed anyone. He just doesn’t have it in him. His older brother, well, now, he’s a different story.”

  Detective Wallace jotted in his ever-present notebook. “Just the same, I would be grateful if you paid Jackson a visit, or see if you can locate his whereabouts. You know how ex-cons are.”

  “Thick as thieves.”

  “It’s like a brotherhood.”

  “Let me get your number, and I‘ll take a spin by the Price farm later this afternoon.”

  “Much obliged, Sheriff,” Detective Wallace said with his best cowboy western impersonation.

  Sheriff Laskey shut the door on the brown cruiser with his title emblazoned down the side in bold silver letters. He pulled out onto Route 29 south, and drove past the barbecue pit restaurant on the edge of Lovingston proper before turning on Route 808 for the winding two lane road that ran past the Price farm. True to the words of every county resident, he pulled up to the open gate exactly twenty minutes later.

  His cruiser kicked up dust as it rolled down the gravel and dirt drive that meandered through a short grove of mature trees. At the end of the trees the road cut right and traversed an open field that led to a picturesque two-story farmhouse.

  The sheriff’s car came to rest on the left side of the house. The sheriff pulled his lanky frame from the vehicle and took a deep breath of the afternoon air before walking towards the front door. The sun was at its winter apex in the sky. He stepped on the front porch and premonition tied a knot in his stomach. There were no outwards signs that anything was amiss. There were no newspapers piled on the porch, not that the Price brothers would have bothered to read them if they had been delivered. There was nothing in the outward appearance to tell Sheriff Laskey that something was wrong. Nothing except the dull warning in his stomach, a feeling that had proven time and time again to be more accurate than real evidence.

  He knocked on the door, waited, and knocked again. He found himself checking his weapon with his right hand and unsnapping the small leather strap that kept the gun in his holster. It’s just a hunch, he said to himself. Nothing but a hunch.

  He tried the door knob with no luck and stepped off the wooden porch with his hand still on his holstered weapon. He peered into a sitting room through a side window on the house and carefully walked to the back of the property, his eyes darting with alertness. He moved around a small plastic table and chairs resting on a patch of stone slabs that had been arranged to form a make-shift patio. He pressed his nose to the window on the back door and twisted the locked knob.

  His nose against the glass, his warm breath fogging up the window, Laskey jumped as the sound of crashing wood rushed him from behind. His gun was in hand with the safety off before he turned around. Senses jumped to high alert. Laskey stepped from the porch, his weapon by his side. A few seconds passed and another collision echoed across the backyard. The sheriff stared out towards the large gray barn behind the house. He gingerly moved across the yard, less anxious than he had been a moment earlier. To him, old barns were something he had grown up with. Even angry old barns that were barking out warnings. Shadows from the sun through the naked tree branches covered the ground as he approached the edge of the barn. Laskey peeked his head around the corner, momentarily looking down the sights of his pistol before dropping it into a two handed waist high position.

  “Nelson County Sheriff’s Office,” he announced to the empty stalls, the hayloft, and the work area in the back left corner.

  Silence.

  He walked through the barn, his boots landing on remnants of old hay and dirt. At the far end of the barn he stopped at the workbench and took inventory of the tools that hung on the wall. A large wood saw hung by its handle. An oversized wrench dangled from a hook. An assortment of hammers, files, and vises filled the area in no particular order. A basket of old horse bridles rested on the floor near the rear entrance of the barn.

  The large door in the opposite corner of the barn slammed shut with surprising authority, the metal plate near the lock smacking hard against the door frame. Laskey whirled towards the noise. The sheriff, sweat beading beneath his gray hairline, pushed open the rear door and stuck a nearby pitchfork into the ground to stop the door from slamming in the wind. Silence restored, he stared out at the rolling acres that made up the Price family farm. He looked towards a large pile of weeds near a neglected fence line and scanned the horizon for anything suspicious. In the distance he could see the ski runs on Wintergreen and the snow covered tree-line that ran along the Blue Ridge Parkway at four thousand feet.

  He brought his focus from the mountains in the distance and zoomed in on the Price farm. His eyes narrowed, the wrinkles in his forehead gathering near those between his eyebrows and the top of his nose.

  Sheriff Laskey walked to the edge of the field and stomped over the dead grass to a row of withered plants, some half-heartedly standing, leaning in the winter wind, waiting for the arrival of a spring they wouldn’t live to see. He reached down and picked a plant off the ground. The core stem was firm, hardy. He grabbed the stalk and held it next to his body to estimate the height. The plant towered his six-two frame. “Just what in the hell have we been growing here?” he asked.

  The sheriff reached into his pocket and pulled out a bag of Red Man chewing tobacco. Brain food. He pushed his thumb and the first two fingers of his hand into the corner of the foil-lined bag and pulled out a wad of dark brown, intertwined tobacco leaves. He shoved them into the right side of his cheek and bit down several times to release the juice. He spit once, and moved the wad into the pocket of his gum-line.

  “Now let’s see what we have going on,” he said to himself in almost a whisper.

  With a hundred acres of land, the sheriff had no intention of walking the entire farm. When he finished his chew, he would be finished with his walk. For ten minutes he walked across the Price farm among the never-ending sea of dead plants, stopping occasionally to examine their remains, to pick at their seeds, the hopeful offspring for a future generation. When he reached the start of the old apple orchard, a faint smell in the air brought him back to reality.

  He saw the boots first, the dangling toes of the shoes protruding from the side of an apple tree in the distance. As he approached, the large brass belt buckle in the shape of the initials J.P. stared back at him at eye-level. Jackson Price, or what was left of him, was three feet off the ground, his neck snapped, an old rope holding his weight from a branch above. His hands tied behind his back. “Godammit,” the Sheriff said. He dislodged the chew from his cheek and spit it on the ground.

  He picked up his radio and called his deputy sheriff. He checked for dirt on the bottom of Jackson’s boots and then took a look at the man’s face and tried to remember what he looked like before death had come calling. A stiff breeze kicked up and Sheriff Laskey made his way back to the house. He stood on the front porch and waited for the Cavalry. A cooler wind and the sirens in the distance were the only reply.

  The Pig and Whistle was crowded, by Nelson County standards. Two men in camouflage, obviously on the return leg from stalking one of God’s creatures that may or may not have been in season, stood in line at the small counter that served made-to-order sandwiches. The larger and dirtier of the two men asked old Mrs. Dalto
n what the sandwich-of-the-day was. Mrs. Dalton, hair tied back in a white hairnet with a matching white apron, gave her standard response. “Country ham on country wheat.” It was an answer she had given everyday for thirty years and one that most of the population of southern Nelson County knew before it was given.

  A teenage girl with an oversized jacket that made her look like a red Michelin man stood at the single soda cooler, trying to decide between three varieties of Coke. The Pig and Whistle had long since excluded itself from the Pepsi versus Coke battle played out in commercials and advertisements. The eight hundred square foot store didn’t have room for variety. And there was no competition within ten miles to force them to do anything they weren’t good and ready to do. At seventy-five, Mr. and Mrs. Dalton were past the time in their lives when they saw change as a good thing.

  When Sheriff Laskey walked into the store, Mr. Dalton was hunched over the counter reading an old issue of the Nelson County Times. His white hair was combed over and the sheriff got a bird’s eye view of Mr. Dalton’s effort to conceal the effects of the recessive maternal gene. “Good afternoon, Sheriff.”

  “Good afternoon.”

  “What can we do ya’ for?”

  The two men in camouflage grabbed their sandwiches from Mrs. Dalton and squeezed past the sheriff to the register. Mrs. Dalton tracked the men from behind the counter and rang them up. Sheriff Laskey watched them as they left the store and headed for the mud-covered pick-up on the far side of the parking lot.

  “You seen anything strange around here?”