It was unbelievably dry, even for someone used to authoring and reading government sandpaper, but he finally found it. It was an obscure LHM—Letterhead Memorandum—for the deputy assistant director of the FBI, dated September 12, 1968. It had been routed through the SAC, or special agent in charge, of the Memphis Field Office. The author was B. Carlton Smith, head of the FBI’s “Task Force on Organized Racial Violence: South”—probably some forgotten spinoff of the Bureau’s WHITE HATE COINTELPRO, the Counterintelligence Program, directed against the KKK from 1964 to 1971. Levine remembered reading the memo a month earlier when he’d first begun chasing his tail. He remembered it for its absolutely arid style of prose and for the fact that he’d never heard of the Task Force on Organized Racial Violence before, nor of B. Carlton Smith. The latter wasn’t all that surprising. If Agent Smith, or Dr. Smith, or Professor Smith was heading a major task force back in the mid-1960s, then he must have had some seniority, and that was thirty-five, forty years ago. He certainly was retired now and maybe even dead.
The couple of sentences that Levine had been looking for hadn’t meant anything a month ago in the abstract sterility of his Memphis office, and they really only acquired meaning in light of what Jimbo Bevins and Edd Forrest had said to him about gentlemen’s clubs and social clubs. Chief Forrest had said that Big Ray was a member of some “social clubs.” Jimbo had said almost the same thing. And there it was: Page 14 of 35, Section 2, Paragraph C, under the section entitled Historical Background. Carlton Smith had written:
The Bureau, indeed many others in the varied judiciary and law enforcement agencies dealing with the thorny issue of organized racial violence, have but a poor understanding of the myriad native culture(s) in what is too often termed “The South,” as if it were a monolith lacking internal variation. The New South, in fact, is a broad, vastly complex region, and it is critical to understand that in isolated pockets, many southerners view organizations such as the disparate chapters of the Klu Klux Klan not as organs of violence but rather as sodalities serving an important social function; a necessary membership ticket for career advancement in business and politics, indeed, in society in general.
Career advancement, such as making chief of police,Levine thought.
Chapter 27
Split Tree, Arkansas
MONDAY, MAY25, 1987, MEMORIALDAY
It should have been a day of immense pride. A day to swell one’s chest and pop some buttons.
Instead Big Ray Elmore felt—what?—what did he feel?—not humiliation…that wasn’t quite right. Shame? That was probably closer to the mark. It was a bright, late spring morning. Cool and blue and green and yellow and red. Big open sky. The air smelled of impending summer vacation and long days swimming and fishing and playing baseball until late into the evening. You could smell hot dogs and hamburgers and crinkly paper bags of pork rinds and hear the buzzing insects, and dogs barking, and children laughing. It should have been a time of joy, a time to drop a young, sweet melon and enjoy the long-lit day. It was all there: the sights, the smells, the hopes. Big Ray was newly retired as police chief, and his grandson—W.R.’s oldest boy, Jimmie Ray Elmore, had recently gotten a football scholarship to Arkansas Tech.
Just like Ray Junior had, so many years ago.
Big Ray had to smile when he looked at him. Big and strong and so absolutely full of himself. The young women flocked around him; so did the other young men, jostling one another like young rams butting heads; reveling in their proximity to him. Every time Big Ray looked up, his grandson had some other boy in a good-natured headlock, holding it just long enough to register currency in some pretty young girl’s eye. He’d be leaving in a couple of months for school, but right now, on this day, young Jimmie Ray was the hottest young stud in Split Tree.
Just like Ray Junior had been.
Memorial Days in small southern towns are special times; big-time events. There are parades and picnics and Air National Guard flyovers. The school bands are at their best after a long year’s practice. The girls are the prettiest in their cotton sundresses and straw hats. It is a time when old men dust off the dreams of their youth, and young men imagine a wide-open world.
But not for Big Ray and the ghost that kept close to his side. The one that chafed his soul daily.
Grace Trimble was there, in a place of honor on the reviewing stand. She was the mother of the town’s Navy Cross awardee. The town’s hero. She had on a blue dress with small white speckles and a large, flat-brimmed white hat with a band of tiny yellow-white flowers. Big Ray’s wife, Ella Mae, was there, too, next to Grace, one chair off from the center. Her son might not have been awarded a Navy Cross, but Ray Junior’s loss affirmed her status on the stage. Twenty years later, she still grieved pitifully, and it was only on rare occasions, like today, that she would tentatively emerge from her protective shell. She smiled and chatted politely with Grace, but she might as well have been sitting on the shaded side of the moon. She was fragile, and Big Ray could see the cracks widening each day.
Big Ray had been asked to be the grand marshal of the parade. A decorated veteran of World War II, Purple Heart club, and the father of one of the fifty-eight thousand young men who never came home from Vietnam. He’d declined.
How could he marshal a parade? Did he not wear the mark on his forehead? He saw it in the mirror every morning. Saw it every night. Didn’t everyone else? He’d wondered, ever since he visited that memorial in Washington last year, how long it would be before someone checked the record and uncovered the shameful truth. That would be the final hammer blow. His wife would shatter into so many slivers of delicate glass that there would be no mending.
How did he live with himself?
How did his other son, W.R.?
He had never confronted W.R. about it; he didn’t have to. He knew. He’d known. He’d figured it out. W.R. had covered for his brother, had wickered the lie, and Big Ray had willingly gone along with it, to his everlasting shame. Why? He told himself that it was to protect his fragile wife. But had it been? Was it that, or was it to protect his own image, the reputation that he had crafted in this small community over a lifetime? He didn’t think so, but the question gnawed on him daily like a growing cancer.
In the end, it didn’t matter “Why?” All that mattered was that he’d gone along with a lie and a deception because he couldn’t change what had happened. It was done and had no undoing. And it was only a matter of time before the truth would be flushed out into the light and then it would all be for nothing.
He looked at his wife sitting next to Grace.
Soon it would all be for nothing.
Ironically, declining the position of grand marshal had only raised Big Ray’s esteem in the minds of Split Tree’s citizenry. They attributed it to the self-effacement of a humble man rather than the shame of a man eating himself up from the inside out. He hadn’t been able to avoid the other request, however. Split Tree’s fathers had decided that the time had arrived to dedicate a memorial of their own; to honor and record for posterity the valor and sacrifice of its Vietnam generation. Big Ray, as the father of the town’s only MIA, was asked to read the benediction. He couldn’t refuse. This was not a matter of humility. To refuse would be to dishonor them all, not only Ray Junior but Jimmie Carl Trimble and the other eleven men whose names appeared on the tablet—many of whom were here today, bearded and long-haired and dressed in old military fatigues or leather motorcycle vests covered with patches.
The Reverend Johnie Webb, Jr., of the Oak Glen Baptist congregation had given him the intended passage last weekend to practice: Isaiah 13: 2–3:
Raise a banner on a bare hilltop,
shout to them;
beckon to them
to enter the gates of the nobles.
I have commanded my holy ones;
I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath—
those who rejoice in my triumph.
The mayor of Split Tree had been speaking for quite some
time. He was talking of sacrifice and healing. Big Ray hadn’t heard any of it. Just a soft buzz not unlike that of the cicadas that filled the trees. His mind was on the state football championship in 1965. The one still talked about at barbershops and at the diners and at the feed mill. Folk around here still talked of Ray Junior’s performance that evening—so long ago when the world seemed open and good and neverending.
It was only the silence that had finally grabbed his attention. Even the insects seemed to have hushed on cue.
The mayor had finished. Big Ray looked up and around. How long had everyone been staring at him? He glanced from one face to another; the faces he’d known all his life, now looking so utterly foreign.
He stood up slowly, his bad leg unwilling. He buttoned and smoothed the front of his suit coat as he glanced to his wife and to Grace Trimble. One looked at him with pride, the other with the delicate vacancy of a life cashed out of purpose. He wanted to smile but nothing would come. He walked to a small podium set in front of a bigger-than-life-sized bronzed statue of a Vietnam-era soldier.
Big Ray Elmore looked at the plaque at the foot of the figure; thirteen names in alphabetical order. The fifth from the top bore a small cross beside it indicating Killed In Action: Raymond Sallis Elmore, Jr.
He closed his eyes and thought of the reverend’s chosen passage. He’d memorized it easily over the last week, never intending to have to read it, but now his memory failed him. It wouldn’t come. Not a line, not a word. Instead, all he could picture was a page in his Bible, a particular passage, not the one that Reverend Webb had assigned him, but another. It was in his Bible, the one by his bed at home. He saw it with absolute clarity. It was the page where he kept his son’s last letter.
He swallowed.
Then he began softly,
“Your wound is incurable,
your injury beyond healing.
There is no one to plead your cause,
no remedy for your sore,
no healing for you.
All your allies have forgotten you;
they care nothing for you.
I have struck you as an enemy would
and punished you as would the cruel,
because your guilt is so great
and your sins so many.
Why do you cry out over your wound,
your pain that has no cure?
Because of your great guilt and many sins
I have done these things to you.”
When he opened his eyes he saw that everyone was still staring at him.
Chapter 28
Split Tree, Arkansas
FRIDAY, AUGUST19, 2005
Kel made good time after leaving the rest stop. Before long he reached Forrest City where he left Interstate 40 for Highway 1 headed south.
Out here in rural east Arkansas, there was something dead on the road every mile or so. Except for the unmistakable gray armored plates of an armadillo, usually it was nothing but a collection of dull feathers or tufts of dark fur and a little clump of reddish meat, with the occasional chemical smell of skunk. He’d forgotten what driving these roads was like, but it was coming back to him.
Near Forrest City he had seen a brown highway sign for Parkin State Park, a seventeen-acre American Indian mound complex on the St. Francis River that dated from aroundA.D. 1300. Kel had trained as an archaeologist and had done his dissertation on a related site in Missouri, but he had never visited Parkin; now he thought about detouring over there for a few minutes before heading back down to Split Tree. He reconsidered. The weekend promised to be particularly slow in Split Tree, and he might need the diversion more on Saturday or Sunday than he did right now.
Nevertheless, his memories of youthful field work in the lower Mississippi River Valley had been rekindled. When he first took the job at the CILHI it had been a departure; a shift from the abstract academic world of archaeology to the pragmatic, fact-filled world of forensics. Archaeology had begun to seem too much like building a house of cards. Grand speculation and extrapolation that could never be proven, just argued over endlessly. How many Indians could dance on the head of a pin? Forensics, on the other hand, was proved daily. The identities matched or they didn’t. You were right or you were wrong—little room for debate. But lately he had begun feeling doubts where there had been none before. Not doubts about the quality of the work that his laboratory did—that was not a concern. Kel took great pride in the fact that the CILHI had achieved a hard-won reputation as the best skeletal identification laboratory in the world. He believed that, certainly. The doubt was something else. Medical doctors relish playing God; Kel didn’t. Who gave him the right, who gave the U.S. government the right, to wade waist-deep into people’s grief, grief that they have walled off for a quarter-century or more. The majority of the families affected by the identification of war dead were grateful. Closure was the byword of the day.
But not everyone.
Increasingly Kel encountered families—women like Grace Trimble—who had managed to knit over an open wound only by sheer daily effort; wounds that the government, that the CILHI, would scrape bloody with their analytical reports and photos.Who gave us that right? He found himself asking that question more and more frequently, and he never heard an answer. And so, even if for a short ride, it was pleasant to relive the days of academic pursuits. Pointless, perhaps, but it had never made an old woman cry.
The vast Mississippi River floodplain swept by, stretching as far as Kel could see, like a gentle undulating ocean of buff and gray, colored with patches of green soybeans and thick rice and white cotton. At one time, barely a thousand years after Christ, the middle and lower Mississippi River Valley had been the center of one of the most advanced civilizations in the North American continent. Veritable cities and centers of trade and art and culture. He smiled at the irony of it. Here he was, a thousand years later, and the same region boasted one of the lowest standards of living in America.
You could still see the remnants of those great centers of civilization. Parkin with its ceremonial mounds was one of the more conspicuous satellites, but plenty of others were here and there, less awesome perhaps, but still discernible to anyone asking the right questions. Small mounds still occasionally dot either side of the road. Once upon a not-too-distant time there had been even more, but the popularity of land planes (large earthmovers that use lasers to control the depths of their cuts—capable of leveling a field almost perfectly flat) in the eighties had resculpted the valley. For the most part, only those mounds with trees growing on them that were large enough to present more headaches to remove than was worth, still remained.
As he drove he noted the presence of trees in fields. Trees were rare in Locust County, at least outside corporate limits, and usually denoted some vestige of antiquity. Occasionally coffin trees could be seen, usually pines, planted in pairs at the birth of a child to mature and provide wood for their coffins when the time warranted. Some lined the fringe of a meandering stream.
Why hadn’t Jimmie Carl Trimble had a choice?The question kept intruding on Kel’s thoughts as he drove, and he couldn’t shake it loose. Dwayne Crockett had said that Trimble was dead before he even got to Vietnam.Why? What could so kill a young man that it showed on his face? In his eyes? As he looked out into the field, at the mounds and headstones and tufts of grass and trees that represented the final family reunion, Kel couldn’t help but think of Jimmie Carl Trimble. He couldn’t help but think of all the young men who died so far from home and the ones they loved. He thought of the almost two thousand from the Vietnam War whose remains were still scattered and buried in unmarked graves so far from home and family.
Buried.
It was the cluster of trees that finally made Kel realize what was wrong.
All wrong.
He cussed himself for not seeing it sooner. It hadn’t made sense at the time, but that was because he hadn’t really stopped to think about it. He’d been enjoying Levine’s obvious frustration adapting to
Split Tree’s pace and character so much that he hadn’t done his own job. It hadn’t made sense, until now. Now it did—because of the trees; the trees made sense.
Donnie Hawk had been bullshitting Levine, jerking this New York wise-ass’s chain, and neither Levine nor Kel had gotten a whiff of it. You don’t give bodies to Boy Scout troops or high-school chess clubs or anyone else. Not in New York, not in Little Rock, and not in Locust County, Arkansas. That’s a fact, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a medical examiner or the town barber elected coroner. Kel knew that; he worked for a government agency dedicated to bringing men home for burial. Burial. Levine should have known it, but he let his preconceptions blind him. Levine had treated these people like inbred rubes from the beginning, and they, in turn, had played him for the fool.
And the answer was there all the time; you only had to look at the trees.
No medical examiner, no coroner, anywhere, had unlimited space—certainly not in a small-town county coroner’s office in one of the poorest counties in the United States. Open case or not, at some time the decision has to be made to dispose of the remains, to get them off the shelf. In a case like this one, the most likely option would be burial.
The trees.
Burials.
Cemeteries.
John Doe’s remains had been buried, Kel was sure of it. Levine had been so absolutely spun out of control that he couldn’t think straight, and Kel had been so amused watching him that he hadn’t thought straight either. Now he was thinking. They were buried; he knew it. He was also equally sure that the coroner knew where they were, or at least knew how to go about finding that information. But Donnie Hawk wouldn’t tell Levine now, and the chances weren’t good that he’d be any more forthcoming with another outsider, whether the outsider had roots in Split Tree or not.
But there were other ways. There was sure to be a document trail; it was only a matter of sniffing it out.
One Drop of Blood Page 21