by Bill Brooks
I’ve no interest in being courted, and if I had, that man would have to ask my permission, not that of my father.
Of course. Forgive me my assumption. You are indeed a grown woman now. But think carefully about it—about your future. There isn’t much of one for a young woman with ahhh . . .
Affliction I think is the word you’re thinking, sir.
I did not mean to . . .
Elizabeth Brouchard
I tell you, Billy, I watched this tall well-constructed man mount his tall and well-constructed horse and there was an aura about him of something cheap and insincere and not quite truthful. Having looked into his unflinching gaze, I’d no doubt that this Mr. Grayson was a man whose heart was carved from ancient glaciers, or that he would stop at little to achieve his aims. I was just as pleased that our conversation was brief and that I didn’t have to suffer longer his greedy stare, or hear his condemnation of Tom. And when he rode off, I had only these words in my heart: Goodbye and good riddance, Mr. Grayson.
CHAPTER 32
The Testament of Tyree Shinbone
I was wondering when you’d get around to me.
I’ve gotten around to you now, Mr. Shinbone.
I can see that you have. Have they all told you what a madman I am?
There have been certain allusions made.
Has anyone told you you have the bluest eyes?
I am not so easily charmed or you so mad, I think.
You know, sister, I might be able to fix your affliction. Do you want me to lay hands on you and together we’ll pray that the Lord almighty will fix your tongue?
Not here for that, Reverend.
Look at the flight of the hawk as she glides along the ridges looking for a mouse, a hare, anything at all that she can eat or take to her roost and feed her fledglings.
I did not come to talk to you of hawks and other wonders of nature either, sir.
O, I know you didn’t, I know you didn’t. You came to talk to me about murder and scandalous events, of naked haunches aglow in the moon’s light and the depth of man’s desire and depravity and all manner of sordid things. But you did not come here to talk to me about mending broken tongues or hawks. Tell me, Miss Brouchard, what does a sprite of a girl like you want to know such things for?
I’ve made a promise.
To Dooley, yes, he’s mentioned you, your kind nature. He’s told me of your visits to him at the jail. If I didn’t know better, why, I’d say he’s in love with you. Do you think it’s possible for a man with the gallows on his mind to let thoughts of love creep in?
I don’t know what is possible or what is not in the affairs of death or love . . .
But surely you know the story already, why come to me? For if I’m mad as they say, then what stock can you place in me, dear sweet child?
The story keeps changing, everywhere I turn, every lip that speaks it, speaks it differently . . .
Because they all know of their guilt in the matter—they’re all complicit, you see, in poor Laura Foster’s dying.
It wasn’t far from here where it happened . . .
Not far at all . . . why you can almost throw a stone as far. Have you gone there yet, seen the little wooden cross, her name burned into it—the wild lilies that have sprung so pale where her innocent bones smolder? I have, and I tell you, it is a sad thing to think of one so fair and pretty lying deep and alone and silent for evermore.
Yes, I have visited her grave where the river in spring cannot reach it . . .
O, they are wise here who bury the dead. They are wise about so many things: when to plant and when to harvest and where to dig a grave. They are wise in every way except the condition of the human heart. Of that, they know nothing at all. For they are hungering, these people. Hungering for things they cannot have, starved for the flesh of Jesus Christ almighty, thirsty for the lamb’s blood. They are not the people of Moses—the chosen ones—but rather the ones not chosen, the lost tribe of Israel. Listen.
I don’t hear a thing . . .
At night you can hear their fiddles sawing and the screeching of tarts. You can hear their laughter as they dance and consort with one another, as they bed each other’s wives and foul each other’s fair daughters to satiate their craven lust. And as sad as it sounds, theirs is the music of lively reels carried over with them in their blood from the gutters of County Cork and alleys of Glasgow and the slums of London. They are gutter snipes and worse, the jetsam and flotsam of the human condition. No country fair and green as the Emerald Isle or the Isle of Man would have them. They are, to put it bluntly, potato eaters.
And what about you, Mr. Shinbone? Aren’t you one of them, too?
I dance the jig and caress the flesh
Like all the rest of them Irish & Black-
Eyed Scots whose fiery anger & poverty
Is like a rock weighted down inside them.
I am dust as they are dust and no better—nay!
You had relations with Pauline Foster. Can you tell me why a man who claims the Lord as his savior would . . .
Indeed, I had her right here in this very place where the Lord hath led me, this but two years since he struck me blind while in the arms of a slattern named Fannie Fright—a tawny tart who made her way from the whorehouses of New Orleans to the best gentleman’s club in Philadelphia where my own father introduced us. I suppose you could say dear Pa Pa and I were bonded by a sort of proxy incest—sharing her as we often did. This, while my own Ma Ma, who was once proposed marriage to by the Prince of Denmark, idled away her time—happy, as it were, with Pa Pa’s hefty allowance and the constant company of handsome young suitors. So you can see why I grew up feasting on the carnal pleasures—even God is hard put to see me off women. Maybe that is why he struck me blind, and maybe I risk being struck blind again.
Struck blind? Literally?
O, yes, yes, then I heard His voice.
My son, my son, why has thou forsaken me?
Have to tell you, it was a hell of a scare.
But it had no lasting effect?
No, none, indeed. For a time, I forsook all pleasure, lived like Saint John in the wilderness . . . came to this place because it seemed to me a wild, unclaimed Eden—a place unspoiled where I could begin my ministry and wash my hands of the past. But Pauline was the devil’s temptation and the devil proved me weak still . . .
(It is a well-known fact that the pox, if left unattended, can lead to insanity. I wonder if this was the case with Mr. Shinbone. For, I look into his eyes and see wild haste, and in his voice there is the sharp edge of something about to slice through all common reality. He doesn’t stand in one place for more than a moment and waves his arms about and moves around in tight little circles, as though something is nagging at his heels. Of all the characters I’ve thus far encountered in my search for your truth, Tom, Mr. Shinbone is by far the most unpredictable and insane.)
Getting back to the events of Laura Foster’s death . . .
Well, you see sweet child—did you say your name was Grace?
Elizabeth.
Well you see, dear Elizabeth, the Lord himself commanded me that fateful day there in Madam Fright’s satin bed:
Go forth into the wilderness and build a temple in my name and bring to this place the Word, and let those who have ears hear, and those who have eyes see, and I shall make you whole again, Tyree.
He called you by your first name?
O, I know it sounds a bit preposterous . . .
Just a bit.
Came here as though led by His very hand.
(How could I bring him round to tell me anything worth telling? And yet I found myself almost mesmerized by his madness. Could he have been the one who killed Laura Foster? He certainly seemed capable of almost any act—murder notwithstanding. But if this was the case then I knew I must be careful of him, Tom, for he could just as easily kill me.)
I’d like to ask you, Mr. Shinbone, if you think Tom Dooley capable of murder?
&nb
sp; Murder! O, well, we’re all capable of such a thing—why we’re direct descendants of the greatest murderer of them all. Why it’s in our blood to murder and to perform other carnal acts. Tom told me himself of the men he murdered in the war—fuzzy-cheeked boys with blue eyes and blue coats and mouths pink as little girls.
(I told myself to simply pretend that I was writing it all down and never leave on that I thought this man crazed. For either he was, or I was. Tom, how could you have consorted with such a man?)
But Tom was a drummer . . .
Surely he was, but a killer of men as well . . .
This he confessed to you?
O, confess it indeed, but even if he hadn’t, I could see it in his eyes.
Tyree, Tyree, I killed the weak and halted and strong all the same. I shot them through their tunics and through their privates and through their pretty faces. I watched them blow apart and falter and fall and tumble down.
Who, Tom? Who did you shoot and watch tumble down?
The Billy Yanks, of course. It was our proper duty to kill them. It was God’s will. It was manifest destiny—ours, and not Lincoln’s little blue boys.
He told me, too, how he and the boys would march past entire fields of dead, their bodies bloated to twice normal and how the stench was so great they grew sick and wretched all over their own shoes, their bile as yellow as the sun on wild daisies.
That is what we did to them, Tyree—those boys whose mothers sent them off with pretty red scarves to tie around their pretty little throats to ward off the winter’s chill. But the scarves would not stop our ball. We shot them terrible and turned them into things no living soul could stand to look at or be around—these pretty little blue boys we turned into offal.
O, I told him I didn’t want to hear nothing about that war. I told him I’d been there, myself, giving cold comfort to the broken boys.
Why didn’t you want to hear of it?
Because, I never was in any war. Because my own life had been one of great privilege—my father having paid a man three-hundred dollars to go and fight in my place—our livery man’s son—while I drank good wine and fucked lonely women on silken beds—many of them the wives and sweethearts of those who had volunteered. And it was acceptable to believe that perhaps some of these slatterns’ husbands and sweethearts also then did lay among the dead in those fields Tom was witness to, and perhaps himself had shot and killed. It was too raw to listen to him tell of it.
Silence . . .
O, did I say fuck? Pardon me madam for my lewdness; it just comes over me sometimes.
So it was your shame that Tom aroused in you by telling you of the war . . .
Shame is hardly the word for what I felt.
And could such a man murder again—could he have murdered Laura Foster?
O, great God, no, I don’t believe it. But was he capable? Yes, as any man is capable. As I am capable, as you are capable . . .
(Did he have it right, Tom? Were you capable of such a thing with all the killing instilled in you by the war?)
O, I can’t let myself believe it.
Shinbone rants, and rants ring in my ears still.
Smell how fresh the air is after it rains. It is as though all the vile past is washed away here in Paris where I have only my poems and books of the memories I chose to keep.
I shall soon stop thinking of all this, Tom.
I shall put together the letters and journal entries and testaments and send them off to a friend, a nice young man in New York who has published some of my poetry. And then it will be finished, this sorrowful journey, at last and I can put you to rest, Tom. I can put to rest this love I’ve had for you and let it be forever still.
It is a journey’s end that I eagerly await & one I shall abhor.
CHAPTER 33
At the Grave of Laura Foster: From the Final Notes of Winston Newbolt, Reporter, New York Herald
You cannot speak, can you sweet sister?
You cannot say who did this thing.
You rest here above the river that one can see slithering through the oaks and ash and poplars, slithering like a fat green snake toward some hapless hare.
There, there near that river they have told me of death and lust consuming—yours and Grayson’s Negro and others as well. It seems to me it is like a pitiless Eden this place, for see how serene it looks to the unadorned eye. And here you are above it, looking down for evermore—slipped from thy earthly bonds only to return a resting angel. Safe in your grave now, sweet sister, safe for evermore. Death has protected you from further desecration and will keep you now as one of its own. In that way, I suppose I am to envy you your death. For, who knows what awaits me—what pain and suffering, what great loneliness and failure I’ve yet to endure? But you’ve gone through that vale and beyond & in death, there can only be peace. As they say, Rest In Peace. I think it true, for nothing more can harm you where you are now.
O, I came this long distance thinking I’d write it all up quick and hasten back to New York and be done with this rustic place and its rustic people. That I’d make the city dwellers read how murder of a young and lovely innocent played out amid these hills. I’d make them see you as one of their own, and cause them to grieve for you just a little bit over their suppers, and realize how lucky they all were to be safe and far removed from this place. For you see, dear, dear Laura Foster, it’s a writer’s desire to make his readers feel the truest feelings about those they never met. And I wanted them to feel that way toward you—as though they’d known you, as though you were one of their very own.
But I’m not sure I can do it, for I haven’t yet learned who murdered you. And without that secret told, the story is incomplete and you are incomplete and so am I. Most I’ve talked to say Tom Dooley did it. Others believe it was Cousin Ann who had a hand in it. Others still, conjecture that it could just as well have been the madman, Shinbone, or maybe even the self-righteous Grayson who struts about on his big horse. They tell me this bush here to the side of your headstone is laurel, and that one yonder is hollyhock, and somewhere back up in the undergrowth, I hear a trickle of water I suppose is as pure as was your heart. It is as though the very land itself weeps for you—for the injustice done you. And a greater injustice it will be if they hang the wrong man.
O, how I’d liked to had gotten to know you, to hear your voice, your laughter, to see the pert way your feet walked over this not so hallowed ground. Tom and all the others I’ve spoken to tell me what a beauty you were.
You are the missing witness to this (his)story, the one that will keep me from telling it the way it should be told. The one great injustice in life is that the dead cannot talk and tell us what we long to know: what those final moments for you were like, what went through your pretty little head. You cannot tell even who it was murdered you. And was it fear, or was it hope, or was it simply dreams that suddenly, in that last fateful minute, you knew would never be realized as the silver blade came plunging down?
Who could have been so callous as to do it, to put you here in this lonely place?
Who could be so callous still as not to confess it now?
Let me lay down here with you. Let me rest where you rest. Let me dream even one dream that is yours and I will come as close as I ever shall to telling the world about Laura Foster.
The scent of pine is sweet.
Earth, cool in shade.
My hat for a pillow, I lay my head upon the grave where you eternally sleep and close my eyes to the scented wind and try to connect somehow with what you were, what you now are.
For we are one, frail little sister—all of us who have come and gone and who are here now, connected by some invisible cosmic thread. And soon we who are here will be where you now are, in that great by and by—Tom and Ann and me, and all the others—the innocent and the guilty alike. And among them, rest assured, the one who is guilty of this thing will rest too.
But till then, I join you now, for a little while, here in this high pla
ce above the river that moves along, moves along as eternally as life and death itself—as eternally as great love.
Sleep now, and I’ll sleep with you.
CHAPTER 34
The Testament of Augusta Keyes
I am the jailer, Keyes.
I drink some, yes. And I desire a woman’s flesh when I can get it—I won’t deny it. Look at me—a wooden leg and a belly grown big, but with a boy’s heart inside me still. I’m not at the top of any eligible bachelor’s list. And do you know what it is like to keep a man as you might a dog, in a cage, feeding him slops three times a day and carrying away his shit?
So it’s a lonesome life for me, or it’s none at all.
Jailer? Yes. But tell me how many professions are there for a one-leg man? I don’t like it, but I don’t have to like it.
O, I seen them come and go out of here: Drunks, thieves, murderers. I’ve looked into their eyes and saw in them what they didn’t even see in themselves: that they were lost, hopeless, some already dead. I’ve kept them until they either paid their debt or got gone off to Statesville and hanged.
And when the cells are empty, I sometimes hear them walking around up there, the dead, anyway—their ghosts. Because this was the last decent place they lived before the hangman put his rope round their necks—this was the last oasis and that’s why they come back and stomp around at night and I have to get good and drunk not to hear ’em. And I reckon old Tom up there will come back too and I’ll have to hear him and get drunk not to.
O, I know what you’re thinking there, Miss. You’re thinking I’m just like all these others you’ve talked with round here, these illiterates, and mush brains and inbreds. But you’d be wrong in thinking it, because I ain’t like them.
I was growed up proper, with manners and respect for my elders and taught to read and write and was set to go off to college. I was even engaged to a girl whose father was a banker here in Wilkesboro. Pretty girl with strawberry red hair. I had the whole world by its scrawny neck. I was a baseballer—played the outfield and pitched. I was handsome. Look, look here at this photograph. That’s me. That young, lean pretty feller. You wouldn’t know it to look at me now. I had two legs and the world by its scrawny neck.