The day before he died, Riggins made his last entry, writing late at night during the harvest season: “Lettie works hard in the corn field. Jasper, fearful of white men, refuses to come up from Atlanta to help. I told my wife this evening that I love her, something I sometimes forget to do.” Charlie hoped Minerva had been conceived that night, but Riggins, a gentleman, kept such details to himself. Charlie was copying this passage when a key turned and the door swung open.
In swaggered Demetrious Jackson, five-foot-six and rail-thin.
“Hey, Gee-ma!” he called out cheerfully, then did a double-take when Charlie rose to greet him. The grin returned. “You the writah!”
“Yes,” Charlie said as he offered his hand.
Demetrious regarded it with amusement. “Old school,” he said, and shook it. “I’m a writah, too. I write rap songs. Little bit a’ dis, little bit a’ dat, know what I mean?”
“Why aren’t you in school?” Minerva asked.
“Out early today,” Demetrious mumbled. “Bomb threat or somethin’. I’m hungry.”
“You eat some lunch and get back there, you hear me?”
Demetrious went into the kitchen. Minerva shook her head and told Charlie, “I hope he’s not in trouble again. Last grade report had all F’s. I gave him a desk to study at, but it doesn’t do him any good if he’s not here.”
“She thinks I should work at Mickey D’s!” Demetrious shouted from the kitchen.
“I never said that. I want you to finish school so you can get a good job. But working at McDonald’s would be better than what you’re doing now.”
“You mean eating your food,” the teenager responded.
“Eating my food’s fine. I mean cutting school and staying out all night, hanging out with hoods like that one with the handkerchief on his head, that—”
“P-Dog,” Demetrious said, returning with a turkey sandwich and orange juice. “And it’s called a doo-rag.”
“They arrested one of the boys he runs with for robbing a convenience store,” Minerva said.
Demetrious shrugged. “He stupid. I don’t hang with him no more.”
“That’s good, since he’s in jail.”
The teenager ate his sandwich in quick bites, washing the food down with juice.
“Have you talked to Takira lately?” After she didn’t get a response, Minerva said, “You need to look after her. She’s carrying your baby.”
“I don’t know that. We been through this. If it was mine, I say get rid of it.”
“Don’t talk that way.” She flipped on the TV and turned her attention to the noon news.
“Where do you go to school?” Charlie asked.
Demetrious ignored the question. “What about you, Book Man? I heard what you doin’. How much you payin’ us for our story? You make a movie ’bout somebody, you gotta pay ’em.” He nodded solemnly. “I know that’s right.”
“I’m not making a movie. I’m writing a book.”
“Well, my name in it, I need to get some green, ya know what I’m sayin’?”
“I hear ya,” said Charlie.
“You be thinkin’ about it.” Demetrious emptied his glass and sauntered out the door, slamming it behind him, leaving his dishes for someone else to clean. Minerva opened her mouth to say something, then closed it and shook her head.
An hour later, Charlie left. As he unlocked the van, Demetrious popped out from between two cars down the street. “Yo, Book Man. Wait up.”
Charlie placed his laptop and scanner on the floor behind the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. “What?”
“It’s about my baby momma.” Demetrious was standing close now. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I need some money.”
“Don’t we all.”
“I’m Gee-Ma’s business agent,” he declared.
Charlie laughed. “After the episode with the power bill, I doubt she wants you to represent her.”
“I invested it, man. To make a rap CD.” He shrugged. “Didn’t work out. But that’s done. I want to talk about what’s goin’ on now. How much you get for writing the book?”
“Nothing so far. And there’s no guarantee it will get published or that I’ll get anything.”
The teen looked at Charlie like he was stupid. “I hear you sold a book. What you get for it?”
“The one that’s finished? About minimum wage so far, and it’s all gone.”
“This book make you a lotta money.”
Charlie chuckled and shook his head. “Not necessarily. Most books aren’t bestsellers.”
“Well, this be a good movie. Make a lotta coin.”
“I wish.”
“I need money, man,” Demetrious said, adopting a wheedling tone. “Two large to take care of my woman.”
Charlie decided to take him literally. “You’re never too big to take care of your woman.”
Demetrious laughed. “I see what you sayin’. I mean two gees.”
“I’d advise you to stay in school and get a part-time job.”
“Everybody wants to put me in a McJob, man. I ain’t gonna be a sucka. I need to pay for an abortion, so I need money quick. I figure if you give it to me, at least that’s honest. Takira too young to have a baby. Best for Gee-Ma, too. You know that.”
“I can’t be part of this.”
“Can’t, or doan wanna be?”
“Take your pick.”
“Doan tell me you never.”
“You put yourself in an adult situation. Time to act the part.” Charlie got in the van and started the engine.
What happened next startled Charlie. Demetrious pounded the window and shouted, “You steal my family story to make money! If you want my hep, it’s gonna cost! Hell, just don’t come ’round no mo! This my house!”
Charlie drove off, leaving the boy standing in the street—small, alone, and angry.
* * *
Isaac Cutchins’s parents had come to Forsyth County from Pulaski, Tennessee. This Charlie knew because Susan’s Bible told him so, and being a border-state Yankee, Charlie never forgot it, since Pulaski was the birthplace of the original Ku Klux Klan—the terrorist arm of the Southern Democratic Party during Reconstruction. When Charlie thought of Momo’s monster truck, Nathan Bedford Forrest, he realized that it was only fitting that Pappy’s trail would lead back to that town.
In an attempt to find out more about the family’s roots, Charlie searched the Internet for genealogical background data, hoping to find dirt on the cheap. No dice: The Net would have nothing to do with the varmints. Therefore, duty called for a pilgrimage to the Tennessee town—Pulaskipalooza, Charlie dubbed the trip. Angela would cover for one night with Kathleen, and Susan agreed to pick up the kids from school that day, even though he wouldn’t tell her what he was up to.
Well before dawn on that crisp October day, Charlie departed Bayard Terrace for the four-hour drive with two peanut butter sandwiches and a Thermos full of coffee. The moon was a waning crescent when he passed through Chattanooga, switching from I-75 to I-24 for the trek across southern Tennessee.
Charlie pulled into Pulaski with the morning sun at his back. He parked near the Giles County Courthouse. The Beaux Arts structure, built in 1909 to replace its burned-out predecessor, was garishly beautiful, with large columns on the front portico and smaller ones supporting an oversized dome. Bleary-eyed and road-weary, Charlie saw it as a hungry Chinese dragon preparing to eat the town. When he stepped out of the van, the smell of sulfur hung heavy in the air.
He walked past the statue of Count Casimir Pulaski and went inside to the records room. He found some old deed books containing relevant information and took notes on land ownership by Cutchinses in Giles County after the Civil War. The trail disappeared after 1907, when the antebellum courthouse was destroyed by fire. Hmm. He tapped the tabletop with his fingers. There had to be more. He trudged out of the courthouse into the bright sunlight, squinting and shielding his eyes with his hand, then waving off the stinkpit odor th
at permeated the town. It smelled … like hell. Or maybe he was crazy.
His next stop was Pulaski’s one-story gray stone library, which looked like a sawed-off federal office building. When he entered its special collections room, an older woman wearing a blue floral print dress looked up from her book and frowned at him over her trifocals. Charlie stood before the local histories and found an authoritative-looking work, The Big Book of Giles County History by William Conger, published in 1939. Thurwood would have envied the 1,000-page tome. Charlie turned to the index and found four marvelously dreadful entries under the Cutchins name:
Cutchins, Lemuel, Shot by commanding officer for cowardice, 234;
Cutchins, Render, Received letters of dismissal from First Baptist Church 301—303;
Cutchins, Samuel, Talbot, et al., Ordered to leave Giles County, 323—324; and
Cutchins, Talbot, Tried in absentia for Giles County Courthouse fire, 324.
Charlie hooted at this mother lode of varmintry. The woman gave him the evil eye. “Sorry,” he muttered. He turned to page 234 and read as he stumbled to the table next to her spread-out genealogy books:
Lemuel Cutchins, born in 1839, joined the Tennessee Militia, a fighting unit of the Confederate States of America. A chronic deserter, Cutchins received a bullet in his backside from his commanding officer, Capt. Wilson Johns, an excellent shot and first-rate horseman, on August 14, 1864, while running away from a skirmish with Union foragers near Sandy Creek. This was the third time Cutchins had shown cowardice, and he was listed as deserting under fire.
Lemuel disappeared and later returned to Giles County amid widespread and well-deserved enmity from neighbors, since, in addition to being a known coward, he was rumored to have been a highwayman in Kentucky. Reportedly, he used his ill-gotten gains as a robber to purchase a homestead in Giles.
Charlie turned to page 301 and learned, to his shock, horror (and delight), that Render, son of Lemuel, had been
… found guilty of gross immorality by the First Baptist Church’s board of deacons in 1895 for having engaged in a practice too loathsome to mention. Following his expulsion from the church, Render Cutchins was believed to have tried to make a fresh start with his three wives, a male cousin, and several beleaguered and degraded sheep in Utah, where such perversion might be deemed permissible. Render Cutchins and his ilk will have to answer to a higher power than the Mormon Church when their wretched days on earth are done.
These entries were all the more scandalous coming as they did in an otherwise dry, pedestrian book that consisted mainly of lists of names and histories of gristmills. Indeed, Conger failed to mention Pulaski’s glorious role in the birth of the Klan—an exclusion that in and of itself spoke volumes about Southern history. Charlie wondered if any Cutchinses had belonged to the original Klan. (However, he suspected that the varmints didn’t meet that organization’s standards. Bradley Roy had told him that Momo tried to join the Klan in 1987, but his dues check bounced.) In any case, the Cutchinses’ outrageous behavior awoke the prose stylist in Conger, who railed against those miscreants in righteous indignation.
Charlie became engrossed in the transcription of the minutes of the meeting at which Render Cutchins was cast out of the local church. There were smudges all over the page, while most others in the book remained pristine. One subsequent summary passage was especially well-read:
The banishment of Cutchinses from the county was tied to Render’s expulsion from First Baptist Church, although they did not leave all at once. While Render took his leave of Giles, family members who remained took offense at his “ill treatment,” and there was a war between them and their neighbors involving arson and livestock killings lasting several years. The conflict culminated in the jailing of Lemuel’s brothers, Samuel and Talbot, and two of their sons for burning down the First Baptist Church. The men would escape confinement before trial, however. After that, their families were driven from Giles at gunpoint. For several months, the valiant men of Giles remained on alert to prevent any of the Cutchins clan from sneaking back into Giles to cause more destruction and mischief. Their vigilance proved insufficient, however. According to the trial record, Talbot Cutchins evaded the patrols and set fire to the Giles County Courthouse, then disappeared. He was tried in absentia and found guilty of arson in the first degree. His whereabouts remain unknown to this day.
Charlie rejoiced as he fired up his laptop and typed in these Tennessee tales of varmintry.
After finishing The Big Book, Charlie looked through Geography and Geology of Giles County so he could place the horrible melodrama in its proper setting—the Land of Milk and Honey, as Giles was nicknamed. After a couple of hours of work, Charlie took a break.
On a librarian’s recommendation, Charlie drove to Goodspeed’s Diner for lunch. He took a seat at the counter and ordered meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, fresh baked rolls, and sweet tea. The waitress assured him that Pulaski had nothing to do with the Klan anymore and that blacks and whites there got along “right nicely.” She didn’t know what Charlie was talking about when he mentioned the sulfur-smell he noticed everywhere he went in town. After Charlie paid his check and stepped outside, the smell seemed even stronger than before—almost overpowering, in fact.
He returned to the library and scoured bookshelves for more dirt. From Giles County Marriages and Births: 1866—1910, he learned that the Cutchins family’s sexual habits included not just polygamy (and something unspeakable with that male cousin and the sheep), but also incest.
Silas Cutchins—brother of Lemuel, the Confederate deserter—had escaped mention in Conger’s book but appeared twice in Marriages.
First, he married Elizabeth Dranger in 1875.
They begat Jeremiah Cutchins in 1880.
In 1878, Silas married Tess Smith.
In 1880, Silas and Elizabeth Dranger begat Lucretia.
“Awk-ward,” Charlie sang as he wrote down this last morsel of information.
But there were more complicated arrangements than simple bigamy. Local genealogists had added helpful handwritten notes in the margins to keep track of the comings of Cutchinses: “Silas and Tess had a daughter named Annie Smith Cutchins in 1881—Jeremiah’s half-sister”; and “In 1905, Jeremiah married an Annie Smith—but her married name should have been Annie Smith Cutchins Cutchins. They begat Carl Cutchins four months after the wedding.”
From Susan’s Bible, Charlie knew Jeremiah Cutchins had moved to Forsyth County, Georgia in 1906. He also knew that Gram’s maiden name was Henshaw. According to Marriages, the Henshaws were the unbanished branch of the Cutchins family. Charlie felt nauseous when he recalled Evangeline’s boast that Pappy “went back to Tennessee to marry a hometown girl.”
Clearly, the story had turned ugly—not that it was pretty to begin with. Charlie knew he was treading on dangerous ground. Best if he just stopped there. Actually, he wished he’d stopped sooner, before finding out that the apples on this family tree had hideous worms writhing in them. It was all so obvious: Recessive genes had risen to the top of this bubbling, maggoty stew. “Cutchins blood is thicker than thick and likes of itself way too much,” Charlie wrote in his notes.
He shuddered when he realized this family curse had poisoned his own children. Thankfully, he’d been there to chlorinate the gene pool—but had it been enough? And why did the Cutchinses resent other people swimming in it? From his own experience, he knew that the varmints regarded in-laws as outsiders, barely tolerated and often resented. He was beginning to think that these people would support gay marriage, but only between cousins.
Confounded by the burden of Cutchins history, Charlie stumbled out of the library just before closing time. Declaring his work in Pulaski done, he drove out of town both horrified and enlightened, glad he wasn’t going to spend the night smelling Satan’s spew, for he was now convinced the town had been built over the mouth of hell.
He worried that this was some kind of Abrahamic setup: a test of how far he was willing t
o go or what he would be willing to do. It came back to that essential question: Who or what did he work for, really? He’d once believed he was working the back end of an Old Testament deal—either as a scourge of God or as a debt collector for a fallen angel. Either way, it was a relatively simple, straightforward arrangement. But now the blood-soaked contract was forcing him to turn on his own family and defame his wife and kids. Unfortunately, Charlie couldn’t march into war with the deity he wanted; he was forced to go into war with the deity he had.
That night, Charlie stayed in a Chattanooga motel room and, with great and grim resolve, wrote the Pulaski chapter without pulling any genetic punches, even making a fleeting (if not bleating) reference to those unfortunate sheep. He thought of his mother-in-law’s poor impulse control, close-set beady eyes that crossed when she got angry, and her addiction-to-bling magpie personality. Militant inbreeding explained so much. Even Beck’s 911 call made sense now. The hellish varmint gene is transmitted by the women. Pass it on.
* * *
This nightmare of a book had to end soon, one way or another. Paranoia had set in and constant fear was fraying Charlie’s nerves. Shadows caused him to jump. When he went outside, he looked over his shoulder for black cars and monster trucks. The sooner he went public, the better, but he wasn’t ready to do so just yet. Puzzle pieces were missing. He was able to fill in some gaps by conducting research at the Cumming library on Lillian Scott’s off days. When he put all the pieces together, he would confront Pappy with his findings.
On Halloween, Charlie got a phone call from the mystery woman—that is, the secretary of the Forsyth County Planning Commission’s executive director, although he would continue to pretend he didn’t know who she was. “Trick or Treat,” she said. “I hope you talked to Danny Patterson before he passed.”
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