Alone in a Cabin

by Leanne W. Smith

  “Were Zeke and Tandy friends from the beginning?”

  June shook her head. “I don’t think so. It surprised everybody when they started going together their senior year. I don’t believe anybody saw that coming. It really upset his parents. Irene Thompson was a lovely person—a dear friend. We knew each other from way back, from the time that we were children. I feel so sorry for Ollie. He’s had his share of heartache.”

  “I saw in the court report you testified at Zeke’s trial.”

  “I’ve testified in lots of cases involving my students.” June had a thoughtful wisdom about her, a certain grace, poise. Her voice was low, but carried authority. If Maggie had lived in Marston, she would want to know June Hargrove better.

  June shook her head. “I don’t think there’s a person in this town blamed Zeke for what happened. Most of us felt sorry for him. Then it surprised everyone again he would break out of prison. He wasn’t the type. You expected him to serve his time and get out early for good behavior. Then he just vanished. A rumor went around that Ollie found him dead, but…I don’t know…sometimes puts me in mind of that movie…what was it? Stephen King wrote it.”

  “Shawshank Redemption?”

  “That’s it! You know how that main character goes to Mexico when he escapes from prison?” June nodded thoughtfully. “I wonder if Zeke did something like that, and his father started the rumor that he died so the law would quit looking for him. Some people speculated on that theory. I guess we’ll never really know.” June turned to Maggie then. “What do you think happened to him?”

  Maggie smiled. Yes, she liked June Hargrove. It was easy to picture this woman in front of a classroom of students.

  “I write fiction,” said Maggie.

  June smiled. “You can take liberties then.”

  Maggie thanked June for her time as the ladies of the education committee began to seat themselves around the room.

  “Won’t you join us, Mrs. Raines?” asked Dot Jenkins.

  But Maggie declined. She had much to ponder, and a sudden desire to read back through the police files to see if she’d missed anything. She had nearly collected all the information readily available to her. Now Maggie needed to knuckle down and write the story.

  So she walked back to Canon’s office, and here she found herself, trying to drown out the hum of Amos’ and Shirley’s voices and the static of the radio in the main office, sitting behind Canon’s desk reading through notes scribbled in his sharp, angular handwriting.

  And the story began to come.

  I drove home in the Camaro after a long day at the factory, stopping for take-out at the fish place on ’47 between work and home because Tandy doesn’t like to cook. I asked Hazel, behind the counter, if I could use the phone to see if Tandy wanted that night’s special—catfish with a Cajun sauce—but she never picked up.

  As the phone rang I wondered if she was out on the porch, or had gotten high again with the last of my check and was sitting on the frayed couch in the living room staring at the wall. I’d found her that way lots of times. I knew she had to be at the house—her Pinto was still at the shop after she drank too much at the Ron-dee-vu Road House last month and wrecked on the way back home.

  Bob, at the factory, said he saw her there before the wreck and that she’d cozied up to a man at the bar who kept buying her longnecks. And when she sobered up, she swore to me that was all it was—the man had bought her drinks. She hadn’t gone out back with him to his truck in the parking lot like Bob the liar reported. She didn’t know why Bob would tell such tales on her.

  I’m not a total fool. I knew pretty quick I’d made a foolish choice in Tandy. But she was my wife and I held out hope for her.

  Plus, I remembered well the pain in my parents’ eyes when they begged me not to rush into marriage. Like a stubborn, desperate man searching hard for self-respect, I kept thinking I could turn the sinking ship around.

  I never told them Tandy was pregnant when we married. Or that she had an abortion two months later. When I demanded to know why, I’ll never forget the words she flung back at me. “You should be glad, Zeke. It wasn’t yours anyway.”

  I guess you could say things spiraled down from there.

  My fate seemed sealed. I was to be Hosea rather than my namesake in the Bible. I was to learn the lesson well of a man longing for one kind of relationship, but who gets another—a flawed thing instead, that turns out to be so much less than it was intended for.

  Shame clung to me pretty hard by the time I drove home with those catfish specials in the passenger seat of my Camaro.

  Even driving home that night, I sensed the end was near. No dark road you ever walk down keeps winding on forever. I was tired…more tired than I’d ever been.

  I thought back to that first fateful moment, that first clear crack in my future, when Tandy said, “You should be glad, Zeke. It wasn’t yours anyway.”

  Two months into our marriage.

  Tandy never was mine. Never would be. She was a rolling stone that could not gather moss. I don’t reckon any man was ever meant to hold her. That was the oh-so-hard-to-resist appeal to me in the beginning—to think the mysterious, exotic Tandy Wilkins might love an ordinary guy like me.

  I was seventeen, an easy target, when Tandy first turned her green eyes in my direction. By eighteen she was showing me things in the back of my daddy’s pick-up I hadn’t even thought to dream of. At nineteen, I was married.

  When she spit those words at me, when we were still living in that trailer on Patterson down the road from Mom and Dad—You should be glad, Zeke. It wasn’t yours anyway—I packed to leave. Nineteen or not, I’d had all I wanted. Back seat fantasies or not, I didn’t sign on for treatment like that.

  But Tandy cried and begged me not to. She broke down and told me about the abuses she’d suffered at the hands of her relatives. I felt sorry for her. I thought I could save her from all that—be the medicine for her broken soul, if I only tried hard enough, was patient enough.

  I decided to give it another try, but only after getting her promise she’d be faithful from there on out.

  Of course that didn’t last.

  I think I knew even then—that night she cried and I stopped packing to leave—she wouldn’t be.

  A cheated-on man like me, after a while, starts to build a blind eye. Either that, or something screws up so tight in his gut that it unfurls one night in a bar when he’s trying to get his wife into the Camaro and get her home before she spews her sick out.

  The smell of Tandy’s sick became the fragrance of my life—a smell I could never quite wash from the seats of my Camaro.

  Maggie set her pen down and closed the file, wondering what her true balance of fact and fiction was in her early drafts of scribbled notes.

  There was nothing about Zeke’s death in the file except a small notation Canon had written on a piece of paper and stuck in the back of the last folder. It was dated a week after Zeke’s escape from prison.

  Ollie Thompson found his son, Ezekiel Thompson, frozen on the property (cabin down the road) two days after Zeke’s escape from Turney Center. Buried him in the old Patterson family cemetery behind his house. I, Canon Dale, saw the body and the grave and can verify it was Zeke.

  Case closed.

  27

  "Prison is where I finally became free." Former student in the LIFE Program at Tennessee Prison for Women

  Maggie was in town again. She wanted to look some things up on the Internet and sat at a table in the café to work on the wi-fi. She looked back over her scribbled notes—notes from talking to Dot Jenkins and June Hargrove, re-reading the case files and the newspaper articles, interspersed with her own random thoughts and conclusions, which might or might not be accurate.

  She felt like she’d gotten a sense of who Zeke was and the basic events of what happened that night, but she didn’t know how to best lay out the pieces. What was Zeke thinking when he came in and found Tandy with another man?

&
nbsp; Maggie felt like she was undressing Zeke all over again by lifting the lid on the jar of his life. But…hadn’t Zeke invited her to? Once again she pictured the word ‘everlasting’ on his chest.

  Writing required a lot of thinking time…for Maggie, at least. She scribbled intermittent thoughts in her journal.

  Walt Whitman said the powerful play of humanity goes on and that we each have an opportunity to contribute a verse.

  Maggie held the power to resurrect Zeke’s verse, let it live again, stretch out longer, like a radio signal sending waves into the unknown future. But she battled equal parts doubt and fear. Doubt in her ability to do the story—and Zeke and Mr. Thompson—justice; fear in pouring so much of her soul into a thing that might not interest others. She had to figure out how to make a living, financially. If the book didn’t bring some income, she had lost time that might have been better spent going back to school, brushing up on her technical skills, networking for a more regular job.

  Who knew what any book, like any life, was really meant to do once it was written and offered to the public? Maggie only knew that if she didn’t write Zeke’s story, nobody else was likely to. But a steadier job might have been easier, and the rewards for the labor more predictable.

  The Apostle Paul said he kicked against the goads—the prods used to steer oxen. It was like he was saying, I don’t know if I want the burden you are handing to me, LORD. I don’t know if I believe it’s really a gift in disguise. At least…I think that’s what he meant.

  Maggie felt the same way about writing. Why did she feel called to do this in the first place? It was too hard! She didn’t come looking for this story. She had come to the cabin in Marston thinking she would make up a fictitious story about a guy named Micah Patterson. She had no way of knowing Zeke Thompson would appear.

  Why? Why me, Zeke? What if I don’t have the heart to tell your story? What if I get the tone—the facts—the spirit of you and what you were trying to teach me all confused?

  Maggie knew from personal experience how bad it felt to imagine the scene—your spouse offering himself to another—but to actually walk in on it? To see with your very eyes? How could Zeke not have been filled with rage in that moment? How could he not have picked up that gun and shot Tandy with it?

  Maggie looked up and noticed a woman staring at her, the same woman who glared at her the first time Maggie had come to the café with Canon in January.

  The woman walked over to her table. “I heard you were asking questions about Zeke Thompson.”

  “Are you Rynell?”

  The woman’s eyes flit around the restaurant as she nodded. “Tandy’s sister.” When her eyes came back to Maggie, a sheen covered them. “She weren’t no saint. I know that. She did him wrong.”

  Maggie pushed a side chair out with her foot as an invitation.

  “I cain’t. I’m supposed to be workin.’ I saw you from the kitchen and thought that was you.”

  “Can I meet you after work?”

  Rynell looked around the restaurant again, as if deciding. The woman couldn’t have been much older than Maggie, and had once been attractive. Now smoker’s lines creased her face. Her hair, pulled in a tight ponytail, had been processed quite a bit.

  Maggie had seen pictures of Tandy at this point. Everyone described her as beautiful, and she was. But the same sadness in the back of Tandy’s eyes in the pictures was in this woman’s, too.

  “I get off at six,” she said.

  “Coffee shop on the corner okay?”

  “Sure.”

  When Rynell walked into the coffee shop at six sharp, she sat across from Maggie and got right to it, as if she’d been sitting on information that had haunted her for years…like she’d tried to work the puzzle in her head and was pretty sure she held the final missing piece in her hands, she only needed to lay it on the table.

  “I think Zeke was telling the truth. I think Tandy killed that man from Trenton.”

  No one ever referred to the murdered man by his name. Maybe because ‘George’ seemed too straight-laced a name for a man who sold heroin and had affairs with married women. Plus ‘Iontha’ was hard to pronounce. Everyone who ever mentioned him called him “the man from Trenton.” Maggie thought that made a great title—at the least, a chapter header in the book.

  “Zeke was the biggest reader I ever saw. That’s all he ever wanted for his birthday or Christmas—books. Before he went to prison, Dot Jenkins told me he checked out two or three books ever’ week. Not many men around here even go to the library—it’s where the snooty women all go for meetin’s—the high and mighty educated folk that run this town.”

  Rynell searched in her bag, pulled out a box of Marlboros and tapped one out. This was a no-smoking coffee shop—she glanced at the sign on the door—then she simply held it in her hand, perhaps for security.

  “I cain’t get my head around a reader like that killin’ no one. That just don’t go together. Plus, he knew she was cheatin’ on him. She’d been doin’ it for years. And you know why I think he didn’t leave her? He knew she couldn't make it on her own. She would’ve taken up with someone like that man from Trenton and been livin’ with him, and Zeke feared she’d end up dead.”

  Rynell clutched the cigarette a little tighter in her fingers. “Didn’t make no difference in the end. And Zeke was the one paid for it.”

  She was quiet then. Maggie thought that was all she had wanted to say. “I really appreciate that you were willing to share that with me, Rynell.” But there was more.

  “I heard you were working on a book, to tell Zeke’s story. I guess you’ll make Tandy look bad. She was bad, but…she was my sister.”

  “What was she like, as a sister?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “She was a couple years older than me. Every boy in Marston County was in love with her, and her mean and self-centered as a rattlesnake! We all knew it at home, but she was sweet as honey at school. She knew how to make men love her…and boys before that.

  “They teach in church that a wild child like Tandy won’t get no self-respect, and that may be true, but she holds a certain power over the men. Tandy could have married anybody. I don’t know why she had to go and ruin somebody’s life like Zeke Thompson’s.

  “She ran with this one boy…what was his name? Oh, I forget…on the football team. He left Marston County right after high school. It wasn’t long after that she took up with Zeke. Zeke was a year younger than her, a year older’n me. Didn’t stand a chance.”

  Maggie looked closer at Rynell. Had this woman had feelings for Zeke? It was hard for Maggie to wrap her head around the idea. This woman seemed so aged and Zeke forever young. Tandy, too, was preserved at thirty-four, the age she was when she died.

  “Tandy wasn’t all bad,” Rynell went on to say. “We had some good times, I guess. I wore her hand-me-downs. Tandy was real good at sewing—most people don’t know that. She could have worked at the factory.”

  “What about Zeke? What do you remember about him?”

  “Zeke?” The woman’s eyes grew soft. “Lord, he looked like Leif Garrett. I had a poster of Leif Garrett on my wall from Seventeen magazine. He was real smart, too. I had a class with him when I was a freshman. He was new to Marston. They moved back here—his mother grew up here. He was quiet, but nice.

  “He was one of those boys that nobody paid much attention to until he got to be a senior, and by then all the girls had noticed him. Here in Marston it was the football players that swaggered the most in the hallways. And Zeke…he wasn’t an athlete. But he was nice-lookin’. And smart, except for the stupid choice to marry Tandy. That was an irony.

  “He could have been a lawyer…a doctor…anything he wanted to be.”

  Maggie nodded. Yes, Rynell must have had feelings for Zeke. She wondered how much it had hurt Rynell to watch Zeke’s life spiral from the sidelines.

  “Were you friends? You and Zeke?”

  Rynell looked startled, as if Maggie might be seeing t
oo much, and was quick to shake her head. “I sat next to him in science class, that’s all. And when we had to dissect a frog, he did all the work, so I wouldn’t have to.”

  There was so much more Maggie wanted to ask her. Like, what did you dream of being when you were a girl? Did you marry? Have a family? Did the same demons that haunted Tandy, haunt you? Why did you choose to be different? Waitressing was a hard job, but Rynell was doing it.

  Rynell tapped out her Marlboro, even though it had never been lit, and grabbed her handbag. “I was just curious about your project.”

  She stood to go, then turned.

  “His teeth were real white, but a little crooked. And he told me one time he didn’t have any feelin’ in his left arm, so of course I scratched it all year when he wasn’t lookin’ to try to catch him in the lie. Then he told me the last day of school he really did have feelin’ in that arm. I don’t guess any of that matters, but it happened.”

  * * *

  After Rynell told her about Zeke’s love for reading, Maggie stopped back by the library to see if she could find out what kind of books Zeke checked out.

  “We updated all the cards in 2000,” said Mrs. Jenkins. “Went to a scanning system. Took me months to pull all those old cards out. I was going to keep them, I’m like that you know, a historian. Drives my husband crazy, but we had a summer intern two years ago, and when I went on vacation for a week, I came back and she had pitched those cards out with the trash. Didn’t even ask me!”

  “I thought it was worth a try.” Maggie turned to go when she noticed the vase of fresh flowers again. “How did Canon’s wife die, Dot?” Dot Jenkins was the best source of information Maggie had found in Marston.

  “Brain aneurysm.” Dot’s voice dropped low. “Canon found her in the garden. I wonder if that’s not why he’s kept those flowers going all these years. They’re really something to see. From what I understand he’s added to it every year.”