Brambleman (20 page)

The library, which had just opened, was empty
except for a mother and daughter in the children’s section and an
old woman returning her serial alphabet mysteries. A plump, pretty
librarian with dark hair and gold-framed glasses stood at the
checkout counter. “May I help you?”

“Yes ma’am. I’m doing historical research on
Forsyth County and I was wondering if the library had any
photographs from 1912.” He sensed a pair of eyes fix on him.

At the end of the counter, an older,
heavy-jowled librarian wearing glasses on a beaded chain regarded
him suspiciously. “Your uncle,” she told the younger woman.

“Cousin, actually,” the young librarian said.
“We just call him uncle.” Turning to Charlie, she said, “’Cause
he’s old. He runs the local historical society.”

“What’s his name?”

“Cecil Montgomery.”

The older woman looked away. Charlie
whispered, “He’s no help.”

The younger woman, looking to be in her
mid-thirties, wore a white V-neck sweater. She smiled sheepishly
and glanced over at the other librarian before returning her gaze
to Charlie. “What do you need?” she whispered back.

“Have you ever heard of Martha Jean Rankin?”
When she nodded, he said, “I need a picture of her. She died in
1912.”

She looked at him critically. “I thought I
recognized you. You were in the paper.” She wrinkled her face in
perplexity. “Do you drive a truck?”

“No. I just wear cheap clothes.”

She giggled, drawing a warning glance from
her colleague—apparently the alpha librarian.

“You married Susan Cutchins,” she
whispered.

“I knew that. But how did you?”

“This used to be a small town. My name’s
Lillian Scott.” She looked around. “There aren’t any 1912 pictures
here.” Leaning forward, she whispered, “But I have one. I’ll bring
it tomorrow. Will you be here?”

“I’ll make a point of it.” He turned on his
heel and walked out before he further irritated the older
librarian. “Troll,” he muttered under his breath as he passed by
her desk.

* * *

That night, Charlie edited the chapter
covering the lynching of Ted Galent. Following a ten-page discourse
on capital punishment, Talton had written that Galent, had he been
properly charged, would have faced the relatively minor offense of
concealing a crime. Instead, “Galent was shot to death in his jail
cell, beaten to a pulp, and strung up on a telephone pole in the
center of town and set afire, disrupting communications throughout
the town and causing unnecessary inconvenience to Cumming’s
wealthier citizens.”

Charlie inserted a subhead:
Lynching
Disrupts Phone Service
. After that, he took the laptop
downstairs along with marked-up manuscript pages and turned on the
bare bulb overhead. He fell asleep while rereading the chapter,
still wearing his work clothes and glasses; the papers slid off the
sleeping bag into a pile on the floor.

* * *

He sat on a rickety chair taking dictation
from a dying man in a bed. The stench of shit filled the room,
which was crowded with mismatched old furniture. He gagged,
momentarily breaking the pen’s contact with paper. The dim-eyed man
lying in his own filth saw this and stopped talking, then licked
his lips with a gray tongue and croaked, “You need to get all this
down. ’Cause it the damn truth.”

“Sorry.” The scribe turned to open the
window, but as he placed his hands on the frame, he felt the bitter
cold. He turned back to his clipboard. The dying man stared at the
ceiling and began talking slowly: “I, Joshua Logan, being on my
deathbed, do solemnly swear that I am a sinner and I beg the good
Lord to forgive me for the things I done wrong. I took part in the
killing of a man named Galent in the year of our Lord 1912 and the
taking of another man’s farm that same year. I have farmed the land
as my own ever since, but because it is not my land by any lawful
act, it is not mine to give to my heirs. Though they may not see it
that way, the land belongs to a nigger named Buck Smith, who was
run out of town. We burned his cabin and drew lots to see who would
get his land. I won. And then there was Riggins. Ike Cutchins is
the one to answer for that, more than me. You make sure you write
that down.”

While Logan was talking, a woman with a
weathered face came in with a pitcher of water, placed it on the
bedside table, waved her hand in front of her nose, and left
without pouring any into the empty glass beside it.

Logan motioned for the scribe to put down his
pen. “We was all of us caught up in that thing with the Rankin
girl,” Logan wheezed. “But it wasn’t just that. Niggers was doin’
better than we was. I was a sharecropper and it didn’t seem right.
Some of us just hated ’em. Lots of rich folks liked them better
than us. Then old man Carswell said how if we got rid of niggers
we’d be rid of crime. He was mad ’cause his family couldn’t own ’em
anymore. I didn’t even know I was gonna take the land when we did
it. Had to hire a lawyer—Samuel Jenkins—to make the title look
good.”

Logan paused and licked his parched lips,
needing water. Some meanness inside the young fellow kept him from
giving it to the old man, however. Logan dictated a few more
sentences, then said, “Lemme see what you wrote.” He took the
clipboard and read silently before saying, “Gimme the pen.” He
scrawled his name. “I don’t need to say no more. I’m prayin’ to the
Lord—”

His speech was interrupted by violent spasms.
Logan flopped around on the bed, and his eyes popped wide open. His
face turned purple. It looked like he’d offended God so badly that
the Lord was strangling the son of a bitch. Then Logan was still.
“Aunt Lilly! Aunt Lilly!”

The woman came in and regarded Logan
carefully, then took his pulse. “He’s dead,” she declared, dropping
the hand. She then slapped the corpse’s face hard with the back of
her hand. “Been wantin’ to do that for the longest time. Cee, you
need to get rid of that letter.”

“Yes ma’am.” They both retreated to the
kitchen, where the fireplace burned brightly. The scribe threw the
sheet into the flames and asked the woman, “Anything more you need
me to do?”

“Don’t tell a soul. Nobody needs to know what
he said. Not ever. This land’s all I got—”

“I know.”

She gave him a sullen gaze. “Don’t have much
choice, do I?”

“Not for me to say, Aunt Lilly.”

“You run along and tell your parents. After
they take the body away, I need you to come back and help me get
rid of the mattress. Guess we burn it.” She wrinkled her nose. “Now
I got to wash him off before they come. Seems like I pay good money
for the funeral home to do it.” She considered the issue, then
shook her head. “People will talk. Best I do it.”

“You want us to say a prayer for him?”

“Ain’t no point, where he’s goin’.”

He shuddered when he saw the cold hatred in
her eyes. “I understand.”

When he stepped outside into the blustery
cold, he recalled that he was due at choir practice in an hour. He
realized that his name was Cecil, but his friends called him Monty.
He also felt a pang of longing for the high school football team’s
quarterback, but he would have to keep that to himself. “Oh my
goodness,” he said as he trotted off, “I’m gay.” But that word
didn’t sound right to his ears, not in 1953.

* * *

Charlie typed Logan’s confessional scene,
including the letter, into his laptop. Although Logan’s name didn’t
appear in
Flight from Forsyth
, Talton had interviewed Buck
Smith’s son Isaiah. It was the work’s most gripping passage. And
now Cecil was helping, despite his antipathy to the project.
Charlie chuckled with glee.

He went upstairs to look for blank
stationery. He could hear Kathleen moaning through her own dreams,
sounding both intriguing and unladylike. Thurwood must be visiting.
He found a sheet of paper that appeared to be the right size, then
returned downstairs and rewrote the note using his closed laptop as
a backboard. Due to overwork, Charlie was troubled by a knot at the
base knuckle of his right ring finger. His grip on his fountain pen
was cramped, the penmanship scrabbly—not his own. It was a tricky
proposition, using a first-hand account from a lyncher and
land-stealer, especially since the letter had been burned, but he’d
think of a way to use it. Everything came to him so easily now.
Such is life in the realm of the professionally weird.

* * *

Charlie drove past Cumming, continuing
northwest, figuring Joshua Logan lay in the graveyard of the First
Church of Varmintville, since the Second Church hadn’t been built
until the 1980s. Less than two miles from Pappy’s farm, he pulled
into the gravel parking lot of the fading clapboard church. He
zipped up his parka and ambled toward the unfenced cemetery. Weeds
had overgrown the plastic flowers that adorned the graves; his work
boots crunched dried stalks as he conducted his search.

The throaty roar of dual glasspack mufflers
shattered the quiet. Charlie recognized the sound. His chest
tightened as he ducked behind a tombstone. An instant later, Momo’s
red monster Chevy pickup truck—
General Nathan Bedford
Forrest
—rolled by less than fifty feet away. Charlie knew that
Momo, who had threatened to kill him the last time they’d seen each
other, kept a gun handy.

The truck’s big V-8 engine chugged
lethargically at the stop sign before it roared off in the
direction of Pappy’s house. Charlie stood and dusted off his knees,
trying to convince himself that his Caravan was invisible. He
glanced at the tombstone he’d been hiding behind.

Joshua Logan

Born July 12, 1888

Died Feb. 3, 1953

GONE TO HIS REWARD

Nice delphic touch
. And a single
headstone. He searched for the wife’s grave but found no marker for
her. Charlie remembered the vicious slap from his dream. The lonely
grave was further confirmation that his vision of Logan’s death was
true, so true. Clearly, the miracle shouted down the fraud.

* * *

Lillian Scott, sitting at the reference desk,
looked up and smiled at Charlie as he approached. Wordlessly, the
Forsyth librarian opened a drawer and produced a manila envelope.
“You wanted to see this, I believe,” she said, pulling out a heavy
sheet of paper and turning it to face him. Shocked, he held up his
drawing, which he’d smuggled in under his parka. She stared at it
wide-eyed. “It’s the exact same picture!” she said, drawing the
unwelcome attention of the library troll. “My great-grandma drew
that picture. How’d you get it?”

“I … uh—”

“Looks like the original, except that the
paper’s new.”

“And cheap, unfortunately. I drew it from a
copy. I inherited some stuff,” he whispered.

Leaning forward, she confided, “I inherited
some things, too.”

“Really? What?”

“Some old journals and letters from back in
the day. I haven’t really read them, but there might be something
there.”

“I’d like to see them.”

She looked at the other drawing he’d placed
on the desk. “That’s the killer, isn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

Before he could stop her, Lillian summoned
the library troll, who stiffly walked over and hoisted her chained
glasses upon her nose as she regarded the picture. “Bernie Dent,”
she declared.

“Indeed it is,” he said.

“Where’d you get this?” the older librarian
demanded.

“He inherited it,” Lillian said.

The older woman eyed Charlie suspiciously.
“You’re working on a book about the old days, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Charlie said. “And I’ve got some more
work to do.”

On that note, he departed—without getting the
younger woman’s phone number (or giving out any information,
either). By then he was thinking he already had everything he
needed—especially since his dreams were proving to be real and
true.

When he returned to Bayard Terrace, Charlie
skipped lunch and placed Joshua’s death statement on a cookie
sheet, then brushed the paper with tea and baked it at low
temperature. Of course it wouldn’t pass the test of authenticity.
Therefore, he would make a copy and destroy the original—if what he
was cooking could be called an original. He still wasn’t sure
exactly what he’d do with it, but he’d keep it handy nonetheless.
Only one person alive had ever seen its message. One other person,
that is.

Kathleen came into the kitchen looking for
her reading glasses. “What are you doing?’

“Experimenting,” he said. “Trying to see how
somebody might get away with something.”

“I see,” she said, pursing her lips. “Will
they?”

“That’s always the issue, isn’t it?”

* * *

Another night, another excessively vivid
dream, another writing marathon. When he took a break, Charlie
glanced at the clock and gasped. The school bell would ring in five
minutes! And teachers were already extremely tired of his
tardiness. He dashed out the door and sped off in his van. When he
was ten minutes away from his destination, his cellphone rang. He
winced as he answered.

“The principal called and asked if you’re all
right,” Susan said, her tone flat as a manhole cover.

“Hey, Suse,” he said, trying to sound breezy.
“Just running a little late.”

“That’s been happening a lot, and it’s not
acceptable. They’re not babysitters.”

“What are they going to do, call Family and
Children Services?”

“Actually, they just might.”

Ouch. Charlie knew this could be an issue in
custody hearings, if it came to that. “I’ll do better. ’Bye.” He
pounded the steering wheel in frustration. It wasn’t fair. Couldn’t
people understand that he had to write? And write and write?