by Bev Marshall
I stood up and looked in the bathroom mirror again. I was glad I hadn’t been the one to find her, and I didn’t care a rotten fig if I was never going to have curly hair.
CHAPTER 25
LELAND
After I left the Cottons’ Dairy, I drove up to Stoney Barnes’ house to interview him again, but he wasn’t at home, and the house was dark. I nearly sat in one of the pair of ladder-back chairs on the porch to wait for Barnes to return until I saw that the wood was rough and thought better of it, thereby saving my suit pants a snag or two. I did walk around the yard a bit, trying to get a sense of the place and its inhabitants. I thought of the girl’s body wobbling on that stretcher, of the shack out at Mars Hill, of that father of hers with those unnatural hands. I think I was half-expecting some sort of ghoulish face to appear in one of the windows of the house, which had taken on a gothic ambience in my mind. I decided right then to go back into Zebulon and check in with the sheriff.
Sheriff Vairo was just getting into his patrol car when I steered my Pontiac into the space beside him. He waved me over. “You want some news to write up for your column, boy? Jump in. You can get a scoop if you hurry.”
I detest the word “scoop.” It conjures a gum-chewing swell with his hat cocked back and a pencil stuck in his ear, and I deeply resent being referred to as “boy,” which is what most people in Lexie County call Negro men of all ages. But I didn’t hesitate to open the passenger door and slide into the automobile that smelled like a mixture of an outhouse and a cigar factory. I breathed through my mouth, and then said, “What’s our destination, Sheriff?”
“Hospital. Got us a fracas going on over there.”
“A fight? In the hospital? Who? Why?”
The sheriff pulled out into the street narrowly missing a dog that scuttled out of our way. “The Barnes boy and Thad Carruth. Pottle called and said they were fighting over the release of the body. Said he had her out on the table nicely stitched up, and they both busted in about the same time wanting to take her home to be laid out. Before he knew it they were both pulling on her this way and that. Said Jane Madison, the nurse, walked in and nearly fainted when she saw the stitches ripping out. Pottle didn’t see who threw the first punch, but they were into it when he called me.”
My mouth was so dry I had to moisten my lips with my tongue before I could speak. “Why, that’s, that’s, barbaric.” I took out my pad and pen, but my hand was shaky, and I looked out the filthy window at the gray stone building that was the Lexie County Hospital. It could have been Frankenstein’s laboratory. I half expected a man-made monster with a crooked line of raw stitches to walk stiff-legged across the lawn toward us. But there was only Mrs. Quinn holding up the forearm of her son, Jimmy, who was shrieking like a banshee over, I assumed, the small bandage on his left cheek.
Clyde Vairo and I ran down the cement steps to the basement two at a time and skidded into each other trying to make the turn into the morgue. I had expected shouting, rough language, something of that sort, but all was quiet. Casey Pottle intercepted us before we entered the room and ushered us into his office. “They’ve gone,” he said. “Left just minutes before; I’m surprised you didn’t run into them.”
Sheriff Vairo’s disappointment was visible, and I realized that he’d drawn his gun when I saw his hand return to his hip. “Well, hell, Casey, why didn’t you keep them here? You knew I was on my way.”
Pottle’s shaking hand pulled out a drawer in his desk and lifted a pint bottle. He uncapped it and took a long swallow before he answered. “Keep them here? I’m just lucky they didn’t take a swing at me. I don’t think either one of them would have cared if they’d killed me.”
“Where’s the body?” I asked him. “Did they take her?”
Casey shook his head. “No, no. She’s still here. Come see.” He got up and grabbed his keys from the wooden letter box on his desk, and we followed him out. He unlocked the door to the morgue and Sheriff Vairo stuck his head in and whistled. “Whew, I reckon they did have themselves a ruckus in here.” I looked around him and saw that the room was ransacked; tables overturned, steel instruments scattered over the floor, the rollaway table I assumed the girl had been lying on was turned on its side with two wheels pointing up at the ceiling. I realized I had been holding my breath when I began to feel dizzy. I held onto the wall and let the sheriff and Pottle go farther into the room without me.
Pottle stood in the center of the room beside the tipped table. “Now you’re catching on, Clyde. There wasn’t a thing I could do to stop them.”
“So how’d you get them out of here without her?” The sheriff looked down at the sheets that lay on the floor beside his feet. “And where is she?”
Pottle pointed to a door to our left. “In there. When the fight moved out into the hall, I ran to her and dragged her in there. Locked her in the storage closet. When they run back in here, each trying to be the first to get back to her, they saw that she was gone, and got quiet. I told them that I had called you to come and lock them up and that you had the say of who takes her. Mr. Carruth left first and the Barnes boy kept picking up things and dropping them, and then all of a sudden, he wheeled around and ran out too.”
I closed my eyes and for a brief moment I saw the two of them pulling her body apart like a wishbone. I thought of Odysseus meeting Agamemnon in the underworld, and I said, “Nor would they close her two eyes as her soul swam to the underworld or shut her lips.”
The sheriff stared at me and shook his head, but Pottle nodded agreement. “Never in all my years,” he said. Then he turned to Sheriff Vairo. “So where should I send the body?”
“Nowhere. Keep her here. Say she’s evidence; say that you got more to do on the autopsy.”
“But she’s got to go in the ground eventually.”
Sheriff Vairo snapped back. “I know that, Casey. I just want some time.”
When we got back to the jail, our deputy and the only other full-time law enforcement person, Sam Mueller, told the sheriff Mr. Carruth had been there “all riled up like a setting hen.”
I was glad we had missed him.
By the end of the day I knew who the prime suspects were, but the sheriff wouldn’t let me write much about his investigation. “I’m giving you the scoop,” he said, “but you have to give me your word you won’t print anything until you get my okay.”
I said that would be acceptable, that I appreciated the opportunity to learn about how a criminal investigation is conducted. I knew the only reason the sheriff was amenable to my presence was that he was anticipating my writing that he was the hero of this story.
My piece was short, but my notes were prolific. Beneath the heading “suspects,” I drew lines for three columns. The first subheading was “vagrant,” then “Stoney Barnes,” and the last column was titled “Thad Carruth.” The sheriff was most doubtful that a vagrant had committed the crime. “You go in that house, you’ll see they didn’t have nothing worth stealing. If I was looking for some cash or valuables, why I’d break in at the Cottons’ house, not their tenant house. And the girl wasn’t raped, so it wasn’t some pervert type.”
His deductions seemed logical. “So, Sheriff, what about the father, Thad Carruth?” I was thinking of those plate-sized hands.
“Well, we know he beat her. We know he is a violent man who can’t control his temper. You saw that at the morgue. Lloyd Cotton told me he knew for a fact that he had come up to that house when the boy wasn’t home. Beat her…maybe violated her.” Sheriff Vairo’s eyes were on me for my reaction, and I’m sure he was satisfied that I was disbelieving and horrified by his information. After a minute he went on. “So he could have gone up to his own daughter’s house, knowing her husband was at work, was going to take her in her own bed. She struggles, tells him to get out, he won’t go, she’s small and can’t fight back none. He chokes her. Then he panics, knows Stoney Barnes will come back home, find her, maybe guess he done it, and then come after him. So he totes her out to
the cornfield, hoping that when she’s found, people will think she was killed out there.”
“Can Mr. Carruth account for his whereabouts when she was murdered?”
“He said he was possum hunting all night on the Whittingtons’ land, but nobody was with him to prove it. I asked his wife a few questions, and all she knew was that he was back home when she got up around five that morning, and she said they didn’t eat possum for breakfast.”
“What about Stoney Barnes? What makes you suspect him?”
The sheriff took a sip of coffee from a stained cup that looked in dire need of a good scrubbing with disinfectant. “Well, he had the best opportunity to kill her. There wasn’t anybody there with them after his brother left that night.”
“They had company that night?”
“Yeah, the oldest Barnes boy, Hugh. He brought over some hooch and both of them boys was most likely drunk as skunks that night. Every one of them Barnes boys gets wild with liquor in them. The old man too. So could be Stoney gets drunk, him and the girl get into it. Lloyd Cotton knows for sure that he’s given her a black eye before, so he’s capable. Then he goes too far, chokes her, thinks just like I said with the papa. Panics, totes her to the cornfield, hoping folks will think she was killed out there.”
I thought back to my brief interview with Stoney Barnes. His sorrow, his regular features that would be most attractive to the fairer sex, his quiet voice, his youth. He didn’t seem like a person who could strangle a young girl he obviously loved very much, carry her body all that way to the cornfield, and once there, raise his boot and stomp her head into the ground.
“So you’ll question him too?”
“Yep. I’ll go out to the Cottons’ place and have a talk with him first thing in the morning.”
I rose from my chair to return to The Journal offices. I asked one more question. “Who will get the girl’s body then?”
Sheriff Vairo smiled. “Whichever one I don’t lock up for her murder.”
CHAPTER 26
STONEY
I can’t stay in this house; I can’t. Her ghost is here. At night, I hear her calling me, “Stoney, Stoney, Stoney.” Then she starts crying. I listen to her sobbing, and it near breaks my heart. Sometimes it’s that baby wailing all night. Its cries are real weak, like it’s far away, but I hear it all the same. Mostly, though, it’s Sheila I hear, and I cover my head with a pillow, but her voice goes right through the feathers into my head. Last night I got up and I yelled at her. “Hush up now! Leave me be!” But she ain’t gonna quit till I get her in the ground. I know that.
I ain’t gonna be in this house much longer no how. I know that too. My life is over and I never got to see the ocean or California or any place excepting Louisiana, and that wasn’t much.
When the sheriff come out here this morning, I told him that it ain’t right that a man can’t bury his wife. That’s the worst of it. Not burying her. Her lying in that dark basement without nobody who loves her. If I could get her in the ground, she’d stop calling me every night. But that sheriff ain’t got no heart; he ain’t got no wife, and he don’t know how it is. He said he can’t release her body yet, and I just got to wait. Sheila’s papa ain’t getting her. “You ain’t touching my Sheila” is what I yelled at that bastard yesterday down at the morgue, and when he grabbed for her, my fist come up against his head. I seen blood dripping off his face, and I knowed I could take him then. I would’ve too except he run off.
The sheriff wouldn’t say no more about Sheila’s body, said that wasn’t what he’d come to talk about. He kept pulling out his handkerchief and wiping the sweat off’n his face. Me and Sheila ain’t got no fan, and I reckon he wasn’t used to the heat. I didn’t offer him no water though; I wanted him to get the hell outta my house. But he kept on asking questions about Sheila and me. I tried to answer ever’thing he asked, but then he got to tapping his pen on the table and it kept on and on until I got to feeling like thunder was going through my ears and into my head and booming out the other side, and I wanted to put my hands over my ears. He said something else I don’t remember, but finally I heard him say he guessed that was all for now, and he drove off in his sheriff car.
Then less than an hour after he left, I looked out the front door and seen Effie Carruth standing on my porch. She was polite, asking if’n she could come in and talk to me about something important. Behind her I seen a Ford automobile I didn’t recognize filled up with children and a lady sitting behind the wheel wearing a man’s straw hat. Sheila’s mama don’t know how to drive, and I guessed it were some neighbor lady or church friend of hers giving her a lift over to here.
I let her come on in, and she looked around real interested in what-all she seen. She hadn’t never been over before. Sheila’s papa forbid it, said he’d never set foot in Stoney Barnes’ house. She was clutching a big purse to her bosom like it was her baby, and she eased down on the couch real slow like a person with aches and pains. She crossed her feet that was laced up tight in black men’s shoes and swallowed hard a couple of times. Finally, she got to it. “Stoney, Mr. Carruth told me what happened down to the hospital.”
That got my jaw tight. I didn’t answer her and stayed on my feet in front of the spare chair.
“He said the sheriff’s gonna decide on what happens to Sheila.” When she said that her voice caught in her throat and she pressed her lips together for a minute before she went on. “I’m headed to town right now to talk to him, and here’s what I want to say. There don’t have to be no wake at nobody’s house. We could just go right to the funeral and burying. The church is the proper place for her now. I can get us a box for her and, if you’ll say yes to it, I’ll see to it that she gets laid out proper and buried in the Bethel Baptist cemetery out at Mars Hill.” Her knuckles was white on her purse, and I seen how hurt her gray eyes was. Maybe Sheila had been calling her mama at night too is what I thought.
I sat down and dropped my head in my hands. I tried to figure what Sheila would want me to say to this, and I seen her little face all lit up talking about them little young’ns she growed up with. Her mama was a good woman too. I knowed that none of her husband’s doings was her fault. I raised up. “I’ll say yes to it. You tell the sheriff, if he’ll let you have her, I said yes to it.”
Sheila’s mama loosened up on her purse and stood up. “I’ll go then. I’ll see to it and let you know when to come to the church.”
I felt just about as sad as I ever have thinking on walking into the church where Jesus’ face would be looking down on her box. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. “You let me know. I got to be there when she goes in the ground.”
Annette
A storm swept across Lexie County on the September night before Sheila’s funeral. That Sunday morning we sat at the breakfast table eating our eggs and ham slices and biscuits in slow motion. Daddy had bags as big as small lemons beneath his red eyes, and Mama’s face was swollen and sore-looking. “I say let’s skip church this morning,” Daddy said. “We got the funeral to get through this afternoon.” He had just returned from the milk run, and an orange stain ran down his pants in the shape of an exclamation point. I guessed he had broken another bottle of juice.
“Fine with me,” I said. I hadn’t learned my verse for Sunday school.
“Me too,” Mama said. “I guess I should call Mother to let her know; she’ll be worried if we don’t show up.” But she didn’t get up; she propped her elbows on either side of her plate and gazed off toward the stove.
“What time is the funeral?” I asked, looking first at Mama and then at Daddy, who was staring at the ceiling.
“Three,” he said. “Maybe it’ll dry up some by then. Nothing worse than a burial in a water grave.”
Mama came back to us and said in a child’s voice, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a funeral when there was no wake before.”
Daddy pushed his chair back. “Circumstances are different. Autopsy and hard feelings between the Carruths and Stoney.
”
That afternoon I sat looking out the window of Mama’s Dodge as we drove out toward Bethel Baptist at Mars Hill. While the skies had cleared early in the morning, a dark covering of angry clouds had begun to hover over us. The past month had been dry, and the farmers were glad of the afternoon storms that had visited us in the last week. In a way, I was glad of them too. I imagined a funnel cloud lifting our cows, swirling them in the sky like pinwheels. I saw the corn, torn from the soil, dancing around the cows, and Sheila and I riding a stalk, suddenly finding ourselves on a golden road leading to the castle of Oz. I could wake up from that dream, happy again because these last days were only a nightmare, and like Dorothy I would run into Sheila’s house calling her name. She would be there just like Auntie Em, smiling, her arms open to catch me and hold me to her.
The coffin was closed, and I was glad for that. I didn’t want to remember my Best Friend in this ugly square room. She belonged out in the pasture, in the fig tree, somewhere where the wind could blow through her hair and she could smell the buttercups that grew wild over our land. As I sat in the pew looking around the church, I couldn’t help comparing this funeral to Aunt Doris’s. There were only thirty or so people scattered around the room. Sheila’s mother and all of the Carruth children sat on the first two pews on the right. Sheila’s papa stayed away, and Grandma said Mrs. Carruth told her he’d gone off somewhere, but she didn’t know where. We all saw the swelling on her bottom lip and knew that he must have done that before he left. Across from the Carruths Stoney sat with his head down, beside his mother. Stoney’s father laid his arm on the back of the pew, patting his wife on her shoulder pads which stuck up like little bobbed-off wings. None of Stoney’s brothers came. Hugh’s wife, Earlene, sat on the other end of the pew, sniffing into her lace-edged handkerchief. She told Grandma that Hugh had gone to Jackson with the two other brothers, Pete and Daniel.