Not hardly likely, as my daddy would say.
Nevertheless, I went out to my car and blew the horn long and loud.
Buster, the old hound, nuzzled my hand as I stood beside the car indecisively. And that was another thing. If J.C. were out stumping across the farm on crutches, Buster wouldn’t be hanging around the back door. He’d be right out there with J.C.
It didn’t make sense, yet if there’s one thing the law has taught me, it’s that it doesn’t pay to formulate a theory without all the facts. I headed back inside to phone and see if Helen and Sammy Junior were home yet, and as I lifted the receiver from the kitchen wall, I saw something I’d missed before.
At the far end of the den, beyond the high-backed couch, the fireplace screen had been moved to one side of the hearth, and there were scraps of charred paper in the grate.
I remembered the smell of burning paper that had hung in the air when I first arrived, I started toward the fireplace, and now I could see the coffee table strewn with the Sunday edition of the Raleigh News and Observer.
As I rounded the high couch, I nearly tripped on a pair of crutches, but they barely registered, so startled was I by seeing J.C. lying there motionless, his eyes closed.
“Glory, J.C.!” I exclaimed. “You asleep? That must be some painkiller the doctor-”
I suddenly realized that the brightly colored sheet of Sunday comics over his chest was drenched in his own bright blood.
I knelt beside the old man and clutched his callused, work-worn hand. It was still warm. His faded blue eyes opened, rolled back in his head, then focused on me.
“Deb’rah?” His voice was faint and came from far, far away. “I swear I plumb forgot …”
He gave a long sigh and his eyes closed again.
Dwight Bryant is detective chief of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. After calling the nearest rescue squad, I’d dialed his mother’s phone number on the off chance that he’d be there in the neighborhood and not twenty-two miles away at Dobbs, the county seat.
Four minutes flat after I hung up the phone, I saw his Chevy pickup zoom over the crest of the lane and tear through the arch of pecan trees. He was followed by a bright purple TR, and even in this ghastly situation, I had to smile at his exasperation as Miss Emily Bryant bounded from the car and hurried up the steps ahead of him.
“Damn it all, Mother, if you set the first foot inside that house, I’m gonna arrest you, and I mean it!”
She turned on him, a feisty little carrottop Chihuahua facing down a sandy-brown Saint Bernard. “If you think I’m going to stay out here when one of my oldest and dearest friends may be lying in there-”
“She’s not, Miss Emily,” I said tremulously. J.C.’s blood was under my fingernails from where I’d stanched his chest wound. “I promise you. I looked in every room.”
“And under all the beds and in every closet?” She stamped her small foot imperiously on the porch floor. “I won’t touch a thing, Dwight, but I’ve got to look.”
“No.” That was the law talking, not her son; and she huffed but quit arguing.
“Okay, Deborah,” said Dwight, holding the screen door open for me. “Show me,”
Forty-five minutes later we knew no more than before. The rescue squad had arrived and departed again with J.C., who was still unconscious and barely clinging to life.
Sammy Junior and Helen were nearly frantic over Beulah’s disappearance and were torn between following the ambulance and staying put till there was word of her. Eventually they thought to call Donna Sue, who said she’d meet the ambulance at the hospital and stay with J.C. till they heard more.
A general APB had been issued for Beulah, but since nobody knew how she left, there wasn’t much besides her physical appearance to put on the wire.
Dwight’s deputies processed the den and J.C.’s room like a crime scene. After they finished, Dwight and I walked through the house with Sammy Junior and Helen; but they, too, saw nothing out of the ordinary except for the papers strewn in front of J.C.’s bedroom dresser.
Sammy Junior’s impression was the same as mine. “It’s like Mama was interrupted.”
“Doing what?” asked Dwight.
“Probably getting Uncle J.C.’s insurance papers together for him. I said I’d take ’em over to the hospital tomorrow. In all the excitement yesterday when he broke his leg, we didn’t think about ’em.”
He started to leave the room, then hesitated. “Y’all find his gun?”
“Gun?” said Dwight.
Sammy Junior pointed to a pair of empty rifle brackets over the bedroom door. “That’s where he keeps his .22.”
Much as we’d all like to believe this is still God’s country, everything peaceful and nice, most people now latch their doors at night, and they do keep loaded guns around for more than rats and snakes and wild dogs.
Helen shivered and instinctively moved closer to Sammy Junior. “The back door’s always open, Dwight. I’ll bet you anything some burglar or rapist caught her by surprise and forced her to go with him. And then J.C. probably rared up on the couch and they shot him like you’d swat a fly.”
I turned away from the pain on Sammy Junior’s face and stared through the bedroom window as Dwight said, “Been too many cars down the lane and through the yard for us to find any tread marks.”
Any lawyer knows how easily the lives of good decent people can be shattered, but I’ll never get used to the abruptness of it. Trouble seldom comes creeping up gently, giving a person time to prepare or get out of the way. It’s always the freakish bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, the jerk of a steering wheel, the collapse of something rock solid only a second ago.
From the window I saw puffy white clouds floating serenely over the farm. The sun shone as brightly as ever on flowering trees and new-planted corn, warming the earth for another round of seedtime and harvest. A soft wind smoothed the field where J.C. had been disking before his accident yesterday, and in the distance the pond gleamed silver-green before a stand of willows.
My eye was snagged by what looked like a red-and-white cloth several yards into the newly disked field. Probably something Buster had pulled off the clothesline, I thought, and was suddenly aware that the others were waiting for my answer to a question I’d barely heard.
“No,” I replied, “I’d have noticed another car or truck coming out of the lane. Couldn’t have missed them by much, though, because the vegetables on the stove were still hot. Beulah must have turned them off just before going upstairs,”
“It’s a habit with her,” Sammy Junior said. He had his arm around Helen and was kneading her shoulder convulsively. It would probably be bruised tomorrow, but Helen didn’t seem to notice.
“Mama burned so many pots when we were kids that she got to where she wouldn’t leave the kitchen without turning off the vegetables. She’d mean to come right back, but then there was always something that needed doing, and you know how Mama is,”
We did. We surely did, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do” must have been written with Beulah in mind. She always reacted impulsively and couldn’t pass a dusty surface or a dirty windowpane or anything out of place without cleaning it or taking it back to its rightful spot in the house.
Maybe that’s why that scrap of red-and-white cloth out in the field bothered me. If I could see it, so would Beulah. She wouldn’t let it lie out there ten minutes if she could help it, and it was with a need to restore some of her order that I slipped away from the others.
Downstairs, the crime scene crew had finished with the kitchen; and for lack of anything more useful to do, Miss Emily had decided that everybody’d fare better on a full stomach. She’d put bowls of vegetables on the counter, sliced the ham, and set out glasses and a jug of sweet iced tea. At this returning semblance of the ordinary, Helen and Sammy Junior’s three anxious teenagers obediently filled their plates and went outside under the trees to eat. Their parents and Dwight weren’t enthusiastic about food at th
e moment, but Miss Emily bullied them into going through the motions. Even Dwight’s men had to stop and fix a plate.
No one noticed as I passed through the kitchen and down the back steps, past the Johnson grandchildren, who were feeding ham scraps to Buster and talking in low worried tones.
The lane cut through the yard, skirted the end of the field, then wound circuitously around the edge of the woods and on down to the pond; but the red-and-white rag lay on a beeline from the back door to the pond and I hesitated about stepping off the grass. My shoes were two-inch sling-back pumps, and they’d be wrecked if I walked out into the soft dirt of the newly disked field.
As I dithered, I saw that someone else had recently crossed the field on foot.
A single set of tracks.
With growing horror I remembered the red-and-white hostess aprons my aunt Zell had sewed for all her friends last Christmas.
I ran back to my car, grabbed the sneakers I keep in the
trunk, and then rushed to call Dwight.
* * *
It was done strictly by the book.
Dwight’s crime scene crew would later methodically photograph and measure and take pains not to disturb a single clod till every mark Beulah had left on the soft dirt was thoroughly documented; but the rest of us hurried through the turned field, paralleling the footprints from a ten-foot distance and filled with foreboding by the steady, unwavering direction those footsteps had taken.
Beulah’s apron lay about two hundred feet from the edge of the yard, She must have untied the strings and just let it fall as she walked away from it.
The rifle, though, had been deliberately pitched. We could see where she stopped, the depth of her footprints where she heaved it away from her as if it were something suddenly and terribly abhorrent.
After that, there was nothing to show that she’d hesitated a single second. Her footprints went like bullets, straight down to the pond and into the silent, silver-green water,
As with most farm ponds dredged for irrigation, the bottom dropped off steeply from the edge to discourage mosquito larvae.
“How deep is it there?” Dwight asked when we arrived breathless and panting.
“Twelve feet,” said Sammy Junior. “And she never learned how to swim.”
His voice didn’t break, but his chest was heaving, his face got red, and tears streamed from his eyes. “Why? In God’s name, why, Dwight? Helen? Deb’rah? You all know Uncle J.C. near ’bout worships Mama, And we’ve always teased her that J.C. stood for Jesus Christ the way she’s catered to him.”
It was almost dark before they found Beulah’s body.
No one tolled the heavy iron bell at the home place. The old way of alerting the neighborhood to fire or death has long since been replaced by the telephone, but the reaction hasn’t changed much in two hundred years.
By the time that second ambulance passed down the lane, this one on its way to the state’s medical examiner in Chapel Hill, cars filled the yard and lined the ditch banks on either side of the road. And there was no place in Helen’s kitchen or dining room to set another plate of food. It would have taken a full roll of tinfoil to cover all the casseroles, biscuits, pies, deviled eggs, and platters of fried chicken, sliced turkey, and roast pork that had been brought in by shocked friends and relatives.
My aunt Zell arrived, white-faced and grieving, the last of three adventuresome country girls who’d gone off to Goldsboro during World War II to work at the air base. I grew up on stories of those war years: how J.C. had been sent over by his and Beulah’s parents to keep an eye on my mother, Beulah, and Aunt Zell and protect them from the dangers of a military town, how they’d tried to fix him up with a WAC from New Jersey, the Saturday night dances, the innocent flirtations with that steady stream of young airmen who passed through the Army Air Forces Technical Training School at Seymour Johnson Field on their way to the airfields of Europe.
It wasn’t till I was eighteen, the summer between high school and college, the summer Mother was dying, that I learned it hadn’t all been lighthearted laughter.
We’d been sorting through a box of old black-and-white snapshots that Mother was determined to date and label before she died. Among the pictures of her or Aunt Zell or Beulah perched on the wing of a bomber or jitterbugging with anonymous, interchangeable airmen, there was one of Beulah and a young man. They had their arms around each other, and there was a sweet solemnity in their faces that separated this picture from the other clowning ones.
“Who’s that?” I asked, and Mother sat staring into the picture for so long that I had to ask again.
“His name was Donald,” she finally replied. Then her face took on an earnest look I’d come to know that summer, the look that meant I was to be entrusted with another secret, another scrap of her personal history that she couldn’t bear to take to her grave untold even though each tale began, “Now you mustn’t ever repeat this, but-”
“Donald Farraday came from Norwood, Nebraska,” she said. “Exactly halfway between Omaha and Lincoln on the Platte River. That’s what he always said. After he shipped out, Beulah used to look at the map and lay her finger halfway between Omaha and Lincoln and make Zell and me promise that we’d come visit her.”
“I thought Sam was the only one she ever dated seriously,” I protested.
“Beulah was the only one Sam ever dated seriously,” Mother said crisply. “He had his eye on her from the time she was in grade school and he and J.C. used to go hunting together. She wrote to him while he was fighting the Japs, but they weren’t going steady or anything. And she’d have never married Sam if Donald hadn’t died.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding the sad look that sometimes shadowed Beulah’s eyes when only minutes before she and Mother and Aunt Zell might have been giggling over some Goldsboro memory.
Donald Farraday was from a Nebraska wheat farm, Mother told me, on his way to fight in Europe. Beulah met him at a jitterbug contest put on by the canteen, and it’d been love at first sight. Deep and true and all-consuming. They had only sixteen days and fifteen nights together, but that was enough to know this wasn’t a passing wartime romance. Their values, their dreams, everything meshed.
“And they had so much fun together. You’ve never seen two people laugh so much over nothing. She didn’t even cry when he shipped out because she was so happy thinking about what marriage to him was going to be like after the war was over.”
“How did he die?”
“We never really heard,” said Mother. “She had two of the sweetest, most beautiful letters you could ever hope to read, and then nothing. That was near the end when fighting was so heavy in Italy-we knew he was in Italy though it was supposed to be secret. They weren’t married so his parents would’ve gotten the telegram, and of course, not knowing anything about Beulah, they couldn’t write her.”
“So what happened?”
“The war ended. We all came home, I married your daddy, Zell married James. Sam came back from the South Pacific and with Donald dead, Beulah didn’t care who she married.”
“Donna Sue!” I said suddenly.
“Yes,” Mother agreed. “Sue for me, Donna in memory of Donald. She doesn’t know about him, though, and don’t you ever tell her.” Her face was sad as she looked at the photograph in her hand of the boy and girl who’d be forever young, forever in love. “Beulah won’t let us mention his name, but I know she still grieves for what might have been.”
After Mother was gone, I never spoke to Beulah about what I knew. The closest I ever came was my junior year at Carolina when Jeff Creech dumped me for a psych major and I moped into the kitchen where Beulah and Aunt Zell were drinking coffee. I moaned about how my heart was broken and I couldn’t go on and Beulah had smiled at me, “You’ll go on, sugar. A woman’s body doesn’t quit just because her heart breaks.”
Sudden tears had misted Aunt Zell’s eyes-we Stephen-sons can cry over telephone commercials-and Beulah abruptly left,
“She was remembering Donald Farraday, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Sue told you about him?”
“Yes,”
Aunt Zell had sighed then, “I don’t believe a day goes by that she doesn’t remember him.”
The endurance of Beulah’s grief had suddenly put Jeff Creech into perspective, and I realized with a small pang that losing him probably wasn’t going to blight the rest of my life.
As I put my arms around Aunt Zell, I thought of her loss: Mother gone, now Beulah. Only J.C. left to remember those giddy girlhood years. At least the doctors were cautiously optimistic that he’d recover from the shooting.
“Why did she do it?” I asked.
But Aunt Zell was as perplexed as the rest of us. The house was crowded with people who’d known and loved Beulah and J.C. all their lives, and few could recall a true cross word between older brother and younger sister.
“Oh, Mama’d get fussed once in a while when he’d try to keep her from doing something new,” said Donna Sue.
Every wake I’ve ever attended, the survivors always alternate between sudden paroxysms of tears and a need to remember and retell. For all the pained bewilderment and unanswered questions that night, Beulah’s wake was no different.
“Remember, Sammy, how Uncle J.C. didn’t want her to buy that place at the beach?”
“He never liked change,” her brother agreed. “He talked about jellyfish and sharks-”
“-and sun poisoning,” Helen said with a sad smile as she refilled his glass of iced tea. “Don’t forget the sun poisoning.”
“Changed his tune soon enough once he got down there and the fish started biting,” said a cousin as he bit into a sausage biscuit.
One of Dwight’s deputies signaled me from the hallway, and I left them talking about how J.C.’d tried to stop Beulah from touring England with one of her alumnae groups last year, and how he’d fretted the whole time she was gone, afraid her plane would crash into the Atlantic or be hijacked by terrorists.
A Woman’s Eye Page 31