Down by the Riverside

by Jackie Lynn

  “You just stay out of our business and I’ll have no problem with you,” he said. Then he started to move toward the car as his deputy stepped closer to me.

  “Sheriff,” I called to him. He turned around. Deputy Fisk had gotten to my side.

  “Why did you send the body to Nashville?”

  His brow wrinkled. “What?” he asked gruffly.

  “Mr. Franklin’s body,” I answered. “Why didn’t you let the autopsy be done here or in Memphis?”

  He walked back over to where I was sitting and I thought for a moment that he might strike me. Deputy Fisk moved closer to us as if he thought the same thing.

  “Not that I have any reason that I have to answer you, but I never sent him to Nashville for the autopsy. That was the hospital’s doing.” He stood in front of me, blocking the sun.

  I was confused.

  “Sheriff, you need to get that call,” Deputy Fisk said, standing behind me.

  “I suppose I’ll be able to find you here if I have any more questions?” The sheriff asked.

  I nodded slowly.

  “Then you have yourself a nice afternoon,” he said as he turned and walked to the car. He sat in the driver’s side and picked up the receiver.

  “He’s just showing off,” Deputy Fisk said as he moved around to face me. “You can stay as long as you want.” And he smiled and nodded and then walked over to the car.

  In a few minutes, he got in on the passenger’s side, the sheriff started up the car and they drove away. The deputy waved as they exited.

  I watched them leave and wondered why Sheriff Montgomery would lie about the autopsy. I was sure that the coroner had said that it was the sheriff who had made that request to take the body to Nashville.

  The vehicle exited out the driveway and the campground was once again quiet. I left the picnic table and walked inside my camper. I only had a few hours before I was going back to the hospital to sit with Ms. Lou Ellen. I was already looking forward to a long afternoon nap.

  SEVENTEEN

  The long nap was not in my cards for that afternoon. When I walked into my camper, my cell phone was ringing. I had forgotten that I had charged it up and turned it on. I noticed the caller’s number as I flipped it open.

  “Hello,” I said, knowing before I spoke that it was Rip.

  “Rose? Is that you?”

  The sheriff hadn’t been bluffing, he had contacted my ex-husband about me being in West Memphis.

  “Hey, Rip, how ya doing?”

  “How am I doing? I’m doing fine. How are you doing?” he asked, and then added, “Or rather, what are you doing in Tennessee?”

  “Arkansas,” I replied. “I’m in West Memphis, Arkansas.”

  “Oh,” he responded. “I thought West Memphis was in Tennessee.”

  There was a pause on the other end. I felt myself smile. Rip never was very good with geography.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. I thought you were going to California.”

  “Arizona,” I said. “I was planning to get to Arizona.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Bronco broke down. I had to stay here to get it fixed,” I explained.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he asked as if we were still married, as if he was still involved in my car maintenance, as if it mattered to him.

  “I don’t know. The guy had to order a part.”

  “What kind of part?” Once a husband always a husband, just maybe not to the same wife.

  “I don’t know, Rip.” I blew out a short breath. “What did you call for?” I asked.

  “Because the sheriff called me asking a lot of questions. Said you were staying at a place where known criminals stay, that you were impersonating a family member of some dead man. He wanted to know what you were doing there and if I was authorizing the use of our credit card to a Rose Franklin.”

  I could hear someone talking in the background. It sounded like he was at a party or some sort of gathering.

  “Rose, who’s Rose Franklin?”

  I waited for a minute, trying to think of how to explain, trying to understand why I felt so light-headed hearing his voice again.

  “Rose, you there?” he asked.

  I figured he was at the country club. It was Wednesday and he always golfed on Wednesday afternoons. He had been playing with the same three guys for eighteen years. Even though we never had much money, Rip had managed a club membership. It was very important to him to belong.

  “You on the course?” I asked.

  “Nah, we already finished. I’m just having a drink at the pool.”

  Then I realized that he was with her. He never liked the pool, but she did. Her long brown legs, a perfect golden tan; I knew the first time I saw her that she was the lying-by-the-pool kind of woman.

  “Look, just take the credit card bills to my brother. I’ll send him the money. Just let me get settled and then I’ll get my own card.” I heard splashing and a woman laughing.

  “Jesus,” he said, talking to somebody else, “You just got me all wet.”

  “Rip,” I said, “Is that all right? Just send the bills to John.

  “Okay?” I asked again.

  “Yeah, all right.” He sounded angry. “Hang on a minute.”

  I think he was walking away from the commotion.

  “You okay, Rose?” he asked. “I mean, you changing your name and everything. You okay?”

  I was touched by his concern.

  “Yeah, Rip, I’m fine,” I said.

  “Well, look, call me if you need me,” he replied. Then I heard him sigh. “And don’t worry about the Visa bill. You can pay me back when you get to California.”

  “Ari—” I started to say Arizona, but then stopped. I knew it didn’t matter.

  I could see him all red-faced from too much sun, his brown hair turning blond, the small white lines around his eyes.

  “Okay,” he said quickly, as if he was being rushed off the phone. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  And he hung up.

  Marriage isn’t made or lost in a day, a week, even three months. Not even when there’s infidelity or gross disappointment. You can’t just “cut your losses and run,” as a nurse said when she found out what happened between me and Rip. It isn’t that simple or that easy.

  Even in the worse situations, the most flagrant examples of unreasonable expectations or no expectations for a marriage, you can’t tell me that brides and grooms don’t feel something in that ceremony. Two people can’t say those vows out loud, in the company of such optimism and hopefulness that is always present at weddings, and not want the best for that relationship, not desire for good things.

  You don’t just walk away, even in hurt or anger, and not have a few memories of tenderness, a few treasured moments of love. It just isn’t possible. And to hear Rip’s voice again, even a voice that was now answering to someone else’s calls, fulfilling someone else’s dreams, took me back twenty years when I said, “I do,” and meant it.

  You don’t live with a man for all of your adult life and not feel a twinge of regret or disappointment when a cell phone rings and you realize that shared life, like the hopes on a wedding day, are gone forever. You just don’t get over love that easily.

  With the unanticipated phone call and the unforeseen heaviness of heart that followed as its consequence, I knew a nap was out of the question and decided instead to walk again that new path of desire that edged a river and past through mounds of rock. I was going back to Tom Sawyer’s.

  Another warm and sticky day on the Mississippi; I was already sweating. The low clouds dragged across the sky without any promise of rain while the sun burned white-hot. I changed my clothes to a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt, since I was still wearing what I had on the previous day. This was the first time I had been in my camper since I had left the riverbank the night before. I took a quick shower, dried and fixed my hair, put on a little makeup, and headed in the direction I had memorized after having only made one
trip.

  I noticed that the Millers had not returned to their camping site. I figured it would be later that evening or not until the morning before Clara would be released from the hospital. The marrow donation is not a very risky procedure, but doctors usually prefer to watch the donor closely before sending them home. With the added complication of her sister’s death, I assumed they’d choose to keep the little girl and allow the parents to stay the night.

  I walked past their camper, trying to imagine how difficult their journey had been, how difficult their journey was going to be; I realized that I didn’t know which was harder, never being able to know the love of a child or knowing it and then having to let it go.

  I headed past the campground and beyond the pond where I first met Tom when he was fishing. I moved past the narrow pier and then remembered the small light I had seen somewhere near there on my first night at Shady Grove. Since it was in the middle of the afternoon and I was in no hurry, I walked to the other side of the small body of water to see what I might find.

  Somebody had been there, that was evident. A lawn chair was just at the edge of the surrounding woods. There was a bucket as if someone had been fishing and a large coffee can filled with the butts of long, hand-rolled cigarettes. There were a couple of empty beer cans, a plastic soda bottle, and a fishing tackle box. A pair of old binoculars hung on the back of the chair.

  I looked around to see if anyone was nearby, but I didn’t see a soul. I noticed several paths going into the woods, but since I wasn’t wearing long pants or insect repellent, I just decided to return to the path to Tom’s trailer, maybe get him to come back with me later.

  I walked around the quarry and saw a bulldozer standing idle near some rocks and a fresh mound of gravel. Because of the tall fence, I couldn’t see what else was in the boundaries of the quarry, but I did make note of the white sand both in the mounds that had been dug up and along the edge of the wire fence.

  I walked more quickly to Tom’s, thinking that he would be interested in what had occurred during my recent visit from the sheriff. When I arrived at his front porch, I realized that his bike was gone. I called out his name and then went on inside to wait for him.

  “Hey, you here?” I asked, even though I was sure that he wasn’t.

  I didn’t know how he would feel about me roaming around his place without him there, but I had remembered that I had left my jewelry by the bathroom sink, and I knew I would forget my crystal earrings if I didn’t retrieve them while I was thinking about them.

  I stood in his den and looked around. I remembered the ease with which we had spent that morning, the way he buttered my toast with long, heavy strokes, the way he smiled as he poured my coffee, laughing that I drank a full cup before speaking two words.

  I thought about the way we had made love, how clumsy I felt at first, but then how uncomplicated it became once I saw the look in his eyes, that look of pure gentleness, and once I felt his fingers slide across the back of my neck. After that and the tender kiss we shared, it was as easy as our introduction.

  I walked through the kitchen and into the bedroom, heading for the bathroom and my forgotten jewelry, when I glanced over at the nightstand and remembered the passage he had read to me from Thoreau. I walked over and picked up the book, thinking I’d like to see what it was he was reading.

  As I opened it to the dog-eared page he had read to me earlier, a small plastic sleeve fell out from between the pages. I bent down to pick it up and I noticed that it was a gold coin, no larger than a quarter, but thicker as if it bore the weight of a nickel.

  It was old, faded, but I could still make out that on one side there was a large mountain printed on it with the words Pike’s Peak Gold. The word twenty was printed underneath the stamped picture. On the other side there was a profile of a person with stars around the head and the year, 1860, near the bottom.

  I held it up to the window, studying it, wondering about it. It took me a minute, but then I realized what it was. And without completely understanding what I was holding in my hand, I thought of the story he had told me and then immediately decided that Tom must have found some of Percy Dalton’s gold.

  He knew more about the legend of the slave’s Denver gold than he told. He even had one of the coins himself, a coin that Ms. Eulene had said that most of the African-Americans from West Memphis wouldn’t have been interested in. “Meant to buy their flesh,” she had said, and a chill ran down my spine.

  I couldn’t believe it. I sat down on the bed, letting the questions fill my head. I sat trying to piece together the things that I knew, trying to find connections between this gold coin, Lawrence’s death, and all of Tom’s stories.

  It was then that I remembered that Tom had mentioned, and Ms. Eulene had said, that Tom and Lawrence were working on the burial ground project together and that Lawrence had made a discovery about the burial ground fairly recently. Surely, the discovery and Mr. Franklin’s death had to be related. And if those two things were related then finding this coin was connected to these events as well.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t help but feel as if something was not right about this man I had fallen in love with, that something was not right about him and his place on the banks of the Mississippi River. I thought about how little I really knew about the man, how Mary had said he had lived a hard life, had very difficult financial troubles, how he himself mentioned his history of addiction.

  I heard the front door open and close. I jumped up from the bed and stuck the coin in my pocket. I walked immediately to the door of the bedroom.

  “Hey, there,” I called out, trying not to sound nervous or suspicious.

  “Hey.” He smiled and walked over to me. He dropped a large brown envelope on the counter and then threw his arms around me. He looked like he had heard great news.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” he said. “I thought you were going to try and rest this afternoon.”

  I pulled away gently and walked over to the kitchen table.

  “Yeah, I was, but the sheriff unnerved me with his visit.” I took a seat.

  “Get this.” I was trying to sound normal, unaffected by recently acquired news. I acted as normally as I could. “He thinks I came into town and took Lawrence Franklin’s name so that I might get some money from his estate.” I rolled my eyes and threw up my hands. “Can you believe that?”

  Tom raised his eyebrows and stepped toward the refrigerator. “Want something cold to drink?” he asked. He didn’t sound at all concerned that I had been there without him.

  “No, I’m fine,” I answered.

  He took out a soda and popped the top. Then he sat down next to me.

  “That’s something,” he replied. “Did he give you a hard time?” he asked.

  “He tried,” I said, “but he didn’t really bother me. The deputy seemed embarrassed for me.”

  I could feel my heart thumping. I took a few deep breaths to try and calm down.

  “He’s just a big bag of wind,” Tom responded as he took a swallow of his drink.

  “Well, I don’t think he cares too much for me,” I said.

  “Yeah?” Tom smiled. “You make him mad?” he asked.

  I laughed a bit. “I just didn’t make things easy for him is all,” I answered.

  “Well, good for you,” he said. He took another long swallow.

  “So, what are you planning to do now?” he asked, setting the can on the table. “I have a wonderful story.” He reached over and took one of my hands.

  He seemed so loving, so truthful, so innocent. I was a whirl of emotions.

  “I thought I’d go on to the hospital early,” I said, trying to create an easy exit for myself, not paying any attention to his mention of a story. “I figure Rhonda could use a little help with Ms. Lou Ellen’s dinner; and besides she’s been there all day.” I stood up from the table.

  He stood up, too. “Let me just take a quick shower,” he said, “and I’ll drive you over.”

 
“No, no,” I protested. “I’ll get Lucas to take me to Memphis. I’m sure he was planning to go back anyway. Maybe he and Rhonda might want to get a bite to eat somewhere together,” I added, thinking my idea sounded very believable.

  “Okay, then,” he said, and pulled me into himself. “Will I see you in the morning?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I answered and then slowly backed away, stepping over to the door.

  “Rose,” he said softly, reaching over and taking my hand in his. “Are you okay?”

  I smiled as genuinely as I could. “I’m just fine,” I said and opened the door. I stood on the porch. “I’ll call you tonight from the hospital,” I added as I closed the door.

  I hurried up the path before he could answer, knowing that I didn’t have his phone number and that I had completely forgotten to get my jewelry. I reached in my pocket and pressed the coin against my leg.

  EIGHTEEN

  I went first to my camper and grabbed a few things to take with me to the hospital. I knew that I would be there a long time, so I took a sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants, my toothbrush, a few other toiletries, and a magazine. Then I saw my cell phone and I don’t know why, but I sat down at the table and I pressed the key that listed the last caller’s number. Then I hit Send. It was just habit causing me to want to speak again to Rip.

  “Yeah,” he said quickly, without realizing it was my number on his screen. “Honey, I got it,” he said to someone else, to her.

  I hit the button marked End and then turned my phone off. I should have known better than to think I could tell him about Tom and the gold, about Shady Grove. He would have never understood. And even if I wasn’t completely over him, I knew I could no longer rely on him to render a concerned and informed decision about how to live my life; I could no longer call him for support.

  I walked over to the office and found Lucas. He was helping Mary with the paperwork. He said that he was more than happy to drive me back to Baptist Hospital. He was anxious to check on Rhonda and his mother-in-law and anxious, Mary added, to get away from the office. I helped take inventory of all the food Mrs. Franklin had sent over. Mary wanted to make sure we didn’t lose any containers and was thinking that a campground covered-dish dinner might be a nice way for us to show our concern for the Miller family. We were both sure that they would be leaving for Kentucky soon.