Post Facto

by Darryl Wimberley

I began to experience that gnawing panic you might recall from childhood, that sense of being lost or out of control. Like being locked in a closet. I reached into a vest pocket for the familiar lump that was my cell phone, embarrassed to consider the possibility that I might need its GPS signal to locate my position for some deputy or volunteer dispatched to my rescue. But when I popped my phone open I saw that “No Signal” was available.

  So much for that tether.

  I killed another half hour trying to double back through the trees, with no luck. I couldn’t even find the sun; the cloud cover blocked that steady reference. Checking my watch, I confirmed that I’d squandered an hour tramping in circles. I had no beacon to deploy. The ground was wet and, in any case, I had no lighter or match to start a fire. I could feel my chest getting tight and my heart began to pound out of time when, abruptly, help came from a completely unexpected quarter.

  It was a mule.

  I should say, I think it was a mule. Could have been a hinny. And I’m still not sure of the color—a light dun, or even white. He was bridled, but there was no saddle or other tack. No rider either. Probably just got loose from somebody’s paddock or trailer and wandered through a breach in Hiram’s fence. I was not at all surprised to see horseflesh in the flat-woods. Horses have replaced muscle cars as tokens of status in our community, and in fact there is a cottage industry of trail riders who compete throughout the region. I wasn’t sure if mules were allowed on those friendly fields, and, in any case, this looked to be a mount that’d lost its owner.

  “Here, son,” I called out softly and whistled.

  He idled forty yards away in plain sight but seemed oblivious to my presence.

  “Here, boy.”

  The animal ignored me. I considered moving in to make a grab for the reins, but with a snort and a swat of his tail, my sure-footed escort trotted off into a maze of dogwood trees.

  “Jesus!” I said and scrambled to follow.

  I figured since he’d found a way onto the property the mule might be able to lead me out, but the thick ropes of vine and undergrowth made it impossible to keep up with that riderless guide. I lost sight of my feckless escort, but I could hear him, or at least I could hear something large and deliberate pushing through the tangled understory. At my flank, sometimes, or sometimes directly ahead. At the time I assumed it was the mule making that racket, but I suppose it could just as easily have been cattle or hogs.

  I was thoroughly spooked, lost in a terrain alternating between understory and slough, the higher ground a tangle of cat briar and blackberry vines, the sammy treacherous with quicksand and cypress knees. I had no horizon to guide my way. I could not even discern whether I was on a bearing toward the sun or away from it.

  And I was cold. The temperature kept dropping and I was shivering in a bitter breeze. I was also chapped with thirst. You need water, even in winter, and I was about to risk a sip from some puddle or another when I stumbled clumsily into an open glade. Just a few yards of clearing, a wild lawn crusted like cake with the frost. It was a bit startling, actually, having pushed through slog and vine to abruptly emerge onto a plate of unblemished ground. I regained my balance and glanced about. There was no sign of the mule, but at the verge where the understory met the meadow I spotted something I could use—a cedar-shingled smokehouse.

  It was near to ruin, a fair-sized box of timber and listing on a rot of beams. You could still see a jerry-rigged rain cap rusting atop its stack. I unlimbered my Canon and crossed a pan of Saint Augustine to reach the abandoned smoker. I pressed my fingers into the holes where once a pair of hinges was anchored to the stile, but the door was long gone.

  I shook off the cold and took a couple of shots out front and then a photo out back before stepping into the interior. It was a very large smokehouse. I could see where hocks of ham or venison and lengths of sausage had once cured in the smoke of hickory on racks set along the walls or else hung from beams a good seven or eight feet off the dirt floor. I cast about for something to start a fire. A kerosene lamp? Matches? Flint?

  No luck. And even if I’d found working matches, there was no kindling dry enough to start a fire. The building was a smokehouse in name only. In fact, by the look of things, the smoker had been repurposed as a shelter for castoff equipment. There were antiquated farm implements rusting inside the listing walls, a horse-drawn harrow along with a variety of rakes and hoes. I also saw a pair of saddles draped on a sawhorse, the leather half-stripped from their trees. A saddle blanket alongside was welcome. I threw that wrap around my shoulders like a cape and was congratulating myself for finding some barrier against the cold when I saw an object that seemed oddly out of place.

  It was a basket, a large bushel fashioned from palmetto fronds. A faded ribbon wound about the basket’s handle and a handful of shotgun shells moldered inside, the shot spilled from casings long disintegrated. Not much left but the brass. Would have been nice to return with a better camera to capture the details woven into that handcrafted bushel—assuming I could find my way out and back again. I shoved that worry aside, checked the flash on my digital Canon, and got to work. I had taken maybe half a dozen shots of the saddles and one or two studies of the basket before I noticed the noose hanging stiff as bone and black as soot from a beam overhead.

  “Jesus!”

  I recoiled instinctively.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  It took a moment to gather my composure. I thought at first that the loop above my head was a hangman’s noose—that was what leaped to mind, eight tight coils of hemp knotted to a deadly collar. The power of suggestion. However, on calmer inspection, I saw that the rope thrown carelessly over the aging beam above me was only a lariat, the kind of lasso you might use to rope a calf, say, or a horse.

  I reached up tentatively to give the hemp a tug. There was no give. I looked down then and saw a stool. Just an ordinary milk stool, three tiny legs in a metal frame, the seat long rotted through. I imagined what it would be like climbing onto that precarious perch. Reaching for the noose overhead. Was it possible I was standing in the smokehouse where Annie McCray was found swinging? Was this the place where, as locals put it, Butch’s mama ended her troubles? Did Annie McCray fashion eight tight coils to break her neck or did she strangle to death on the tether of a simple riata? Either way, it seemed a lot to expect from a woman who, according to Hattie Briar, hung nothing but laundry.

  What trials did Annie McCray endure that would drive her to suicide? Was it the death of her first husband that drove Annie to despair? But according to Hattie Briar, Annie saw her husband’s bloody corpse in the back of her lover’s truck and never missed a stitch. So if it wasn’t the death of her husband that triggered Annie’s fatal decision, and it wasn’t guilt over her affair with Kelly, what was the straw that led Butch’s mother to end her life?

  I had an editor at the Globe who used to say that a good reporter is like a scientist who constructs a hypothesis and then ruthlessly gathers data to disprove it. Problem was, the data I had pertaining to Annie McCray and her two husbands was largely based on gossip sixty or more years old, stories and lore which, I realized with some consternation, I had accepted as uncritically as any rookie.

  You don’t have to be Bob Woodward to know that people mostly believe what makes them comfortable. Certainly it was easier to say that Harold McCray was a good husband who lost his life in a hunting accident than it was to pursue more sinister possibilities. The sole source I had to counter that accepted narrative was Hattie Briar. Miss Hattie had called Butch’s mother a hussy in our most recent interview, but in earlier conversations she’d had even nicer things to say about Harold McCray.

  “Harold was a sum bitch. Beat up on Annie alla time.”

  “You sure about that, Miss Hattie?”

  “Why she took to wearin’ them long-sleeved blouses and skirts. Even in summer.”

  So that her neighbors would not see the bruises on her arms and legs. The welts on her shoulders from Harold’s
strap.

  I began to feel a tingle at the back of my neck that I hadn’t felt in a long time, something atrophied in the coverage of high school sports and hunting trophies. It was an alarm, a warning bell, an awakening. There was a story to be unearthed from this smoky ground, I could feel it, something between Kelly Lamb and Annie McCray long buried that needed the light of day.

  I knew that Harold McCray wasn’t cold in the ground before his widow made Kelly Lamb the sole heir for every acre she inherited. Six hundred and forty acres makes one hell of a dowry. It made Lamb rich overnight. And then within months Kelly drove to town with the sad news that his newly married wife had taken her own life. Both of Butch McCray’s parents died violently within months of each other without a single witness to corroborate or dispute Kelly Lamb’s version of events, but it was the exchange of land that suggested an awful hypothesis: Was it conceivable that old man Lamb murdered Harold McCray to get his land? And if that was true, if it was true—

  Could Annie have been Kelly’s accomplice?

  I walked out of the bitter-cold smokehouse and onto the white-laced meadow. I could imagine Annie McCray setting out on some sure-footed mule not unlike the animal I’d already encountered to rendezvous with her abusive husband, perhaps on a field like this one, white with frost. I recalled Annie’s tintype photograph to imagine a good-looking woman saddled and shivering on her pale mount, a skirt of gingham or calico riding high to display legs long and white and louche.

  Harold McCray leaves the cover of a heavy thicket to meet his wife in that open glade. He is a dark man, in my imagination, swarthy and unbathed. He has a carbine careless in the crook of an arm. By the way, Harold did own a rifle, an octagonally barreled .30-30; I’ve seen the very weapon on the gun rack of Hiram Lamb’s truck. I can imagine that old repeater in McCray’s arm along with a jug of cider or something stronger slung by a cord over his shoulder.

  There’s Annie, pulling the beribboned basket off the pommel of her saddle, him offering her the jug in return. She takes a long drink, a silver spill of water or cider bright on a neck as fragile as a flute.

  But what then? What direction might the story take?

  Maybe he wants the jug back. Yes, that’s it. Harold gestures for the jug impatiently; she tosses that demijohn down and, with a kick of her heels, drives her mount into a kind of capriole. The mule breaks clear, leaving Annie’s husband exposed in the center of the glade.

  That’s when Kelly Lamb takes his opportunity. I imagine Hiram’s father, and Roscoe’s, stepping from the tangled understory at the meadow’s boundary, a clean-shaven man more slender than Harold McCray, fair-haired and lethal. He levels his carbine without warning. I see an amber flash and a jet of white smoke, and then an explosion echoes with the slug that catches Annie’s husband squarely in his back. Harold McCray pitches forward like a sack of grits onto the grass, blood gushing from his chest and mouth as a bounty of hoecakes and sausage spills from its wickered keep. I can picture Harold bleeding red into the white frost of that killing field.

  As for Annie? Well, what would a hussy do? Not to mention a murderess. She slides from her saddle, ignoring her slaughtered husband to police the litter of sausage and hoecakes scattered about. With that evidence returned to her homemade basket, Annie swings back into her saddle, those legs flashing promiscuously, long and white and firm as a colt’s, Kelly reaching up to pull her down for a rough kiss. A slap to the flank of her mule ends the scene. Annie’s off at a trot, back to the deer camp where Hattie Briar will see her stitching unperturbed until Kelly Lamb arrives much later in the day, a husband’s corpse stiff in the bed of his Model T.

  Not a bad plan, actually. Annie could marry her lover and provide for her idiot son safe from Harold’s fists and any suspicion of foul play. Neighbors and friends were all too willing to believe that Harold McCray died in a hunting accident. Everyone except Hattie Briar. I was indulging in speculation, of course. A line of conjecture fueled by looming hypothermia and an imagined gallows. A tableau posited by a woman cold, tired, and lost.

  But what if it was true?

  That question would have to wait. The weather was turning colder by the hour and I had to find my way back to my vehicle. I had just gathered my camera and blanket and stumped out of the smokehouse when I felt the first warning cramp in my chest, my athlete’s heart.

  “Come on, Clara!” I groaned.

  I clutched my arms to my breasts, stamping my feet on the ground to encourage circulation. A shift in the clouds seemed to reward that effort. The sun broke through, briefly, just above the trees. So that was west. I knew if I headed east long enough I’d hit a fence line or road and so, turning my back to the sun and pulling my pilfered blanket tight, I left the smokehouse and plunged once more into the darkening flatwoods.

  I must have walked in circles for hours. I remember mud sucking up through my shoes, the sudden swallow of unexpected streams and creeks, my pudenda shrinking to the size of a prune in ice-cold water. Scrambling from those streams I stumbled back into the understory, my face and hands and shins shredded in a gauntlet of catbriar and stinging nettles. In and out of water as the temperature continued to plummet. My teeth chattered like dice in my mouth, and then my bowels let go. With equal parts of shame and astonishment, I realized I’d soiled myself.

  And then I felt it. Not an ache, but a lance. A pain deep in my chest.

  “Shit.”

  I fished out my cell phone and stabbed in a 911—but the bars on top told me I still had no signal. And then, abruptly, I could not breathe. I sank to my butt on the soft ground beside a pine tree, the defecation beneath me warm and sour. I opened my mouth to find air. Then again. And then I felt another spear in my chest and I knew—

  I was having a heart attack.

  There was no question of hiking anywhere now. Even if I knew the route back to my vehicle, I couldn’t walk. It took every scrap of energy I had just to recover my breath.

  You’re going to die here, I told myself. Of all the fucking places. To survive hell-holes in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Congo, only to expire on land you once romped in pigtails. I tried to imagine how they’d find me, frozen beneath a blanket on a bed of my own shit. That’s if I was found. I had about resigned myself to that ignominy when I saw a ripple of palmetto nearby and a mule emerged from the slough.

  It was the same mount I’d seen earlier, I’m sure of that. More white than gray, I decided. Still no saddle, but this time the mule had a rider.

  A woman riding bareback. She looked like someone who spent a lot of time outdoors, with a broad face beaten by wind and sun. The temperature by then must have registered in the twenties, not counting the chill of a steady wind, but she seemed perfectly comfortable in some kind of denim jacket over an old-fashioned granny smock. A pair of brogans, but no socks. Her hair was pulled straight back in a golden braid so long that it tapped her mount’s flank in time with the mule’s casual progress. Then I saw the basket slung onto the pommel of her saddle, the splints still green, a garland of bright-colored ribbons spiraled about a handle fashioned from palmetto fronds.

  “Help?” I addressed the vision tentatively.

  She smiled.

  “I got you,” she said.

  I remember riding double without a saddle, my arms wrapped in an intimate embrace around my savior. She had wide hips and a narrow waist. A woman smelling of smoke and magnolia. I leaned onto her back, hoarding the heat rising from her body. Like a fireplace, she was, a furnace. We pushed beneath a stand of mulberry trees and frost fell like snow on her shoulders.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked, and she turned her head to smile.

  That’s all I can recall until the moment I looked up to see Colt Buchanan leaning over me just outside Hiram Lamb’s rusted gate.

  “Easy on, Clara Sue. I got an ambulance coming.”

  “You are one good-looking man, you know that?”

  “You’ve looked better.”

  Hard to sustain a romance wh
en you’re shivering in a salad of defecation. Luckily, when things get truly miserable, shame goes out the window.

  “I got lost,” I apologized.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Randall called me. Said you’d been gone way too long and you weren’t answering your cell.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Your cell phone,” he replied. “GPS.”

  “I couldn’t get a signal,” I said and then saw the mobile in his hand.

  “Working fine now.”

  I must have tried my phone once more when I reached the fence. I must have, but I can’t remember. Maybe my rider dialed for me.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Where’s who, cuz?”

  “Woman who rode me out,” I replied, and tried to find my feet.

  “There weren’t nobody here but you, Clara Sue,” Colt corrected me, and I might have let it go, except—

  I pointed to the frosted field just inside the gate.

  “What’s that then?”

  You could see them clearly, a set of tracks impressed on the hoary pasture beyond the rusted gate. A passage preserved in the freezing chill—one set of tracks coming to the gate, a separate set of tracks heading back to the understory beyond.

  “You see the tracks, Colt?”

  “I do.”

  “That was her!” I declared. “A woman on a mule!”

  “Take it easy, sweet pea.”

  “I couldn’t walk out on my own, Colt. My heart!”

  “I hear you, Clara Sue,” he said, soothing me gently. “It’s all right.”

  I heard a siren wailing up the sandy road and the next thing I remember after that was waking up in a hospital bed in Gainesville.

  Randall holding my hand in both of his. “Hey, babe.”

  “Hey.”

  “So you had a walkabout, what I hear.”

  “Something like,” I nodded.

  “And a rider found you? Woman on horseback?”

  “I . . . think so. Must have.”

  He pressed my hand to his lips. “Too bad you didn’t get her picture.”