Brambleman (33 page)

“I need money, man,” Demetrious said,
adopting a wheedling tone. “Two large to take care of my
woman.”

Charlie decided to take him literally.
“You’re never too big to take care of your woman.”

Demetrious laughed. “I see what you sayin’. I
mean two gees.”

“I’d advise you to stay in school and get a
part-time job.”

“Everybody wants to put me in a McJob, man. I
ain’t gonna be a sucka. I need to pay for an abortion, so I need
money quick. I figure if you give it to me, at least that’s honest.
Takira too young to have a baby. Best for Gee-Ma, too. You know
that.”

“I can’t be part of this.”

“Can’t, or doan wanna be?”

“Take your pick.”

“Doan tell me you never.”

“You put yourself in an adult situation. Time
to act the part.” Charlie got in the van and started the
engine.

What happened next startled Charlie.
Demetrious pounded the window and shouted, “You steal my family
story to make money! If you want my hep, it’s gonna cost! Hell,
just don’t come ’round no mo! This my house!”

Charlie drove off, leaving the boy standing
in the street—small, alone, and angry.

* * *

Isaac Cutchins’s parents had come to Forsyth
County from Pulaski, Tennessee. This Charlie knew because Susan’s
Bible told him so, and being a border-state Yankee, Charlie never
forgot it, since Pulaski was the birthplace of the original Ku Klux
Klan—the terrorist arm of the Southern Democratic Party during
Reconstruction. When Charlie thought of Momo’s monster truck,
Nathan Bedford Forrest
, he realized that it was only fitting
that Pappy’s trail would lead back to that town.

In an attempt to find out more about the
family’s roots, Charlie searched the Internet for genealogical
background data, hoping to find dirt on the cheap. No dice: The Net
would have nothing to do with the varmints. Therefore, duty called
for a pilgrimage to the Tennessee town—Pulaskipalooza, Charlie
dubbed the trip. Angela would cover for one night with Kathleen,
and Susan agreed to pick up the kids from school that day, even
though he wouldn’t tell her what he was up to.

Well before dawn on that crisp October day,
Charlie departed Bayard Terrace for the four-hour drive with two
peanut butter sandwiches and a Thermos full of coffee. The moon was
a waning crescent when he passed through Chattanooga, switching
from I-75 to I-24 for the trek across southern Tennessee.

Charlie pulled into Pulaski with the morning
sun at his back. He parked near the Giles County Courthouse. The
Beaux Arts structure, built in 1909 to replace its burned-out
predecessor, was garishly beautiful, with large columns on the
front portico and smaller ones supporting an oversized dome.
Bleary-eyed and road-weary, Charlie saw it as a hungry Chinese
dragon preparing to eat the town. When he stepped out of the van,
the smell of sulfur hung heavy in the air.

He walked past the statue of Count Casimir
Pulaski and went inside to the records room. He found some old deed
books containing relevant information and took notes on land
ownership by Cutchinses in Giles County after the Civil War. The
trail disappeared after 1907, when the antebellum courthouse was
destroyed by fire.
Hmm
. He tapped the tabletop with his
fingers. There had to be more. He trudged out of the courthouse
into the bright sunlight, squinting and shielding his eyes with his
hand, then waving off the stinkpit odor that permeated the town. It
smelled … like hell. Or maybe he was crazy.

His next stop was Pulaski’s one-story gray
stone library, which looked like a sawed-off federal office
building. When he entered its special collections room, an older
woman wearing a blue floral print dress looked up from her book and
frowned at him over her trifocals. Charlie stood before the local
histories and found an authoritative-looking work,
The Big Book
of Giles County History
by William Conger, published in 1939.
Thurwood would have envied the 1,000-page tome. Charlie turned to
the index and found four marvelously dreadful entries under the
Cutchins name:

Cutchins, Lemuel, Shot by commanding officer
for cowardice, 234;

Cutchins, Render, Received letters of
dismissal from First Baptist Church 301—303;

Cutchins, Samuel, Talbot, et al., Ordered
to leave Giles County, 323—324
; and

Cutchins, Talbot, Tried in absentia for
Giles County Courthouse fire, 324
.

Charlie hooted at this mother lode of
varmintry. The woman gave him the evil eye. “Sorry,” he muttered.
He turned to page 234 and read as he stumbled to the table next to
her spread-out genealogy books:

Lemuel Cutchins, born in 1839, joined the
Tennessee Militia, a fighting unit of the Confederate States of
America. A chronic deserter, Cutchins received a bullet in his
backside from his commanding officer, Capt. Wilson Johns, an
excellent shot and first-rate horseman, on August 14, 1864, while
running away from a skirmish with Union foragers near Sandy Creek.
This was the third time Cutchins had shown cowardice, and he was
listed as deserting under fire.

Lemuel disappeared and later returned to
Giles County amid widespread and well-deserved enmity from
neighbors, since, in addition to being a known coward, he was
rumored to have been a highwayman in Kentucky. Reportedly, he used
his ill-gotten gains as a robber to purchase a homestead in
Giles.

Charlie turned to page 301 and learned, to
his shock, horror (and delight), that Render, son of Lemuel, had
been

… found guilty of gross immorality by the
First Baptist Church’s board of deacons in 1895 for having engaged
in a practice too loathsome to mention. Following his expulsion
from the church, Render Cutchins was believed to have tried to make
a fresh start with his three wives, a male cousin, and several
beleaguered and degraded sheep in Utah, where such perversion might
be deemed permissible. Render Cutchins and his ilk will have to
answer to a higher power than the Mormon Church when their wretched
days on earth are done.

These entries were all the more scandalous
coming as they did in an otherwise dry, pedestrian book that
consisted mainly of lists of names and histories of gristmills.
Indeed, Conger failed to mention Pulaski’s glorious role in the
birth of the Klan—an exclusion that in and of itself spoke volumes
about Southern history. Charlie wondered if any Cutchinses had
belonged to the original Klan. (However, he suspected that the
varmints didn’t meet that organization’s standards. Bradley Roy had
told him that Momo tried to join the Klan in 1987, but his dues
check bounced.) In any case, the Cutchinses’ outrageous behavior
awoke the prose stylist in Conger, who railed against those
miscreants in righteous indignation.

Charlie became engrossed in the transcription
of the minutes of the meeting at which Render Cutchins was cast out
of the local church. There were smudges all over the page, while
most others in the book remained pristine. One subsequent summary
passage was especially well-read:

The banishment of Cutchinses from the county
was tied to Render’s expulsion from First Baptist Church, although
they did not leave all at once. While Render took his leave of
Giles, family members who remained took offense at his “ill
treatment,” and there was a war between them and their neighbors
involving arson and livestock killings lasting several years. The
conflict culminated in the jailing of Lemuel’s brothers, Samuel and
Talbot, and two of their sons for burning down the First Baptist
Church. The men would escape confinement before trial, however.
After that, their families were driven from Giles at gunpoint. For
several months, the valiant men of Giles remained on alert to
prevent any of the Cutchins clan from sneaking back into Giles to
cause more destruction and mischief. Their vigilance proved
insufficient, however. According to the trial record, Talbot
Cutchins evaded the patrols and set fire to the Giles County
Courthouse, then disappeared. He was tried in absentia and found
guilty of arson in the first degree. His whereabouts remain unknown
to this day.

Charlie rejoiced as he fired up his laptop
and typed in these Tennessee tales of varmintry.

After finishing
The Big Book
, Charlie
looked through
Geography and Geology of Giles County
so he
could place the horrible melodrama in its proper setting—the Land
of Milk and Honey, as Giles was nicknamed. After a couple of hours
of work, Charlie took a break.

On a librarian’s recommendation, Charlie
drove to Goodspeed’s Diner for lunch. He took a seat at the counter
and ordered meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, fresh baked
rolls, and sweet tea. The waitress assured him that Pulaski had
nothing to do with the Klan anymore and that blacks and whites
there got along “right nicely.” She didn’t know what Charlie was
talking about when he mentioned the sulfur-smell he noticed
everywhere he went in town. After Charlie paid his check and
stepped outside, the smell seemed even stronger than before—almost
overpowering, in fact.

He returned to the library and scoured
bookshelves for more dirt. From
Giles County Marriages and
Births: 1866—1910
, he learned that the Cutchins family’s sexual
habits included not just polygamy (and something unspeakable with
that male cousin and the sheep), but also incest.

Silas Cutchins—brother of Lemuel, the
Confederate deserter—had escaped mention in Conger’s book but
appeared twice in
Marriages
.

First, he married Elizabeth Dranger in
1875.

They begat Jeremiah Cutchins in 1880.

In 1878, Silas married Tess Smith.

In 1880, Silas and Elizabeth Dranger begat
Lucretia.

“
Awk-ward
,” Charlie sang as he wrote
down this last morsel of information.

But there were more complicated arrangements
than simple bigamy. Local genealogists had added helpful
handwritten notes in the margins to keep track of the comings of
Cutchinses: “Silas and Tess had a daughter named Annie Smith
Cutchins in 1881—Jeremiah’s half-sister”; and “In 1905, Jeremiah
married an Annie Smith—but her married name should have been Annie
Smith Cutchins Cutchins. They begat Carl Cutchins four months after
the wedding.”

From Susan’s Bible, Charlie knew Jeremiah
Cutchins had moved to Forsyth County, Georgia in 1906. He also knew
that Gram’s maiden name was Henshaw. According to
Marriages
,
the Henshaws were the unbanished branch of the Cutchins family.
Charlie felt nauseous when he recalled Evangeline’s boast that
Pappy “went back to Tennessee to marry a hometown girl.”

Clearly, the story had turned ugly—not that
it was pretty to begin with. Charlie knew he was treading on
dangerous ground. Best if he just stopped there. Actually, he
wished he’d stopped sooner, before finding out that the apples on
this family tree had hideous worms writhing in them. It was all so
obvious: Recessive genes had risen to the top of this bubbling,
maggoty stew. “Cutchins blood is thicker than thick and likes of
itself way too much,” Charlie wrote in his notes.

He shuddered when he realized this family
curse had poisoned his own children. Thankfully, he’d been there to
chlorinate the gene pool—but had it been enough? And why did the
Cutchinses resent other people swimming in it? From his own
experience, he knew that the varmints regarded in-laws as
outsiders, barely tolerated and often resented. He was beginning to
think that these people would support gay marriage, but only
between cousins.

Confounded by the burden of Cutchins history,
Charlie stumbled out of the library just before closing time.
Declaring his work in Pulaski done, he drove out of town both
horrified and enlightened, glad he wasn’t going to spend the night
smelling Satan’s spew, for he was now convinced the town had been
built over the mouth of hell.

He worried that this was some kind of
Abrahamic setup: a test of how far he was willing to go or what he
would be willing to do. It came back to that essential question:
Who or what did he work for, really? He’d once believed he was
working the back end of an Old Testament deal—either as a scourge
of God or as a debt collector for a fallen angel. Either way, it
was a relatively simple, straightforward arrangement. But now the
blood-soaked contract was forcing him to turn on his own family and
defame his wife and kids. Unfortunately, Charlie couldn’t march
into war with the deity he wanted; he was forced to go into war
with the deity he had.

That night, Charlie stayed in a Chattanooga
motel room and, with great and grim resolve, wrote the Pulaski
chapter without pulling any genetic punches, even making a fleeting
(if not bleating) reference to those unfortunate sheep. He thought
of his mother-in-law’s poor impulse control, close-set beady eyes
that crossed when she got angry, and her addiction-to-bling magpie
personality. Militant inbreeding explained so much. Even Beck’s 911
call made sense now.
The hellish varmint gene is transmitted by
the women. Pass it on
.

* * *

This nightmare of a book had to end soon, one
way or another. Paranoia had set in and constant fear was fraying
Charlie’s nerves. Shadows caused him to jump. When he went outside,
he looked over his shoulder for black cars and monster trucks. The
sooner he went public, the better, but he wasn’t ready to do so
just yet. Puzzle pieces were missing. He was able to fill in some
gaps by conducting research at the Cumming library on Lillian
Scott’s off days. When he put all the pieces together, he would
confront Pappy with his findings.

On Halloween, Charlie got a phone call from
the mystery woman—that is, the secretary of the Forsyth County
Planning Commission’s executive director, although he would
continue to pretend he didn’t know who she was. “Trick or Treat,”
she said. “I hope you talked to Danny Patterson before he
passed.”