In a Dark Season (9 page)

The Drovers’ Road III

The Professor’s Predicament

Hsst! Hssst!

Lydy jerked awake and lay listening. In the distance a rooster crowed and another answered. First light—and the little barred window was a pale, glowing square high on the dark wall. He rolled over to see the dark hunched forms of two rats scuttling their way across the floor, noses twitching in search of any stray crumb. Bold and unhurried, they approached the heavy door and squeezed their sleek bodies under the corner where persistent gnawing had widened the gap. As the second naked gray tail disappeared, the sound came again.

Hsssst!

Professor? Lydy whispered, looking toward the blanket-wrapped form of his sleeping cell mate. You hear that?

Oh god! came the muttered response as the Professor threw off his cover and swung his feet to the cold floor. He sat blinking and looking up toward the little window.

A rustling could be heard outside and a stifled giggle. Then a woman’s voice whispered, O Tommy, I got something nice for you. There was more rustling and a small stone rattled through the bars, dropping to the brick floor with a thud.

Lydy started in indignation. Ay law, hit’s a cold heart that would rock two helpless critters that can’t run. Did she hit you, Professor?

But the Professor smiled and reached for the thin cord stretching from the window down to the stone it was tied to.

Ah, Miss Nettie Mae, a veritable angel of mercy, a raven to our Elijah. As he spoke, the Professor pulled steadily on the cord and soon a calico-wrapped parcel bumped against the bars. The professor slackened off on the line, gave a sharp tug, and the parcel slipped through the narrow opening, falling into his outstretched hands.

Tommy, you got to git them vittles out and send the cloth and the cord back through the winder quick as ever you kin, the disembodied whisper insisted. If Pa was to wake and find I’ve slipped off—

The Professor’s fingers moved busily as he replied. And how is your worthy sire this morning? Still determined to see me flogged and branded? Or does he prefer to welcome me as a son? My ears are open like a greedy shark, as young John Keats so painfully wrote, to catch the tunings of a voice divine.

The cord that had bound the slim parcel was released and the food removed and placed carefully on the Professor’s bunk. He leaned down to retrieve the stone but Lydy snatched it up and began to unknot the cord.

I believe I’ll keep hold of this, iffen you don’t care. Gimme that there piece of cloth and the twine and I’ll fix it to where I can chuck hit outten the window.

Who’s in there with you, Tommy? Hit ain’t the murderin drover boy, is it? Oh, tell me hit ain’t, for I couldn’t bear it was he to harm you! You know they found that pore girl’s shift, all tore and bloody. And they say the footprints showed he had dragged her down to the river. Oh, Tommy, hit’s the awfullest thing!

My dear, we are all, in this blessed land of the free, innocent till proven guilty, a quaint concept your family seems not to comprehend. The gentleman who shares my lodgings is a most agreeable companion. I beg you to still your apprehension. It is far more likely that I will suffer injury at your father’s hands than those of young Lydy.

The napkin was wrapped tight with the cord into a slender cylinder and, after one bungled attempt, Lydy sent it neatly between the bars. More rustling and the girl’s wistful voice floated up to them. I’ll be back, Tommy, soon’s I can.

Speaking through a mouthful of biscuit and jam, the Professor mumbled, Always at home to you, dear lady. Then a thought seemed to strike him and, swallowing hastily, he called out, Nettie Mae, my sparrow, what
of
your father? What steps is he likely to take?

Well, now, Tommy. I don’t rightly know. Pa’s carried on something fierce and he’s sleepin it off just now. At first he vowed he’d horsewhip you his own self and not wait for the law to act. And then, ol’ Garmon, what was drinkin with Pa to keep him company like, ol’ Garmon speaks up and allows that, was it
his
daughter, he’d geld you like an ox.

At these words both men squirmed. The Professor put down the remains of the biscuit, crossed his legs, and took a quick gulp from the little flask that had been in the center of the parcel. The girl prattled on.

Hit was just talk, you know. But when ol’ Garmon said that hateful thing, I took on so that my mommy spoke up. You uns won’t do no such thing, says she right sharp. When preacher comes back through first of the year, says she, we’ll see to it that feller weds our Nettie Mae for certain sure. Alls you got to do is to leave him be in the jailhouse so’s he don’t get no notion about ramblin on afore the words is spoke. That’s what Mommy said and she fetched ol’ Garman a lick alongside his head and asked him what kind of husband would you make me was you cut?

When the girl’s soft footsteps had died away, the Professor tossed Lydy a biscuit and a withered apple. The code of the dungeon demands that you, my brother in adversity, accept this. It appears that I shall share your incarceration for a few more weeks at least, till such time as the bridal festivities can be accomplished.

The Professor took a thoughtful bite of his biscuit and spoke through the crumbs. I came to these mountains seeking adventure—not matrimony, friend Lydy. But the vagaries of fortune deprived me of my purse and I was forced to take employment. A group of local businessmen and landowners wished their likely offspring to venture beyond the abcedarian fare of Ransom’s schoolhouse and so they provided me with lodging and a quiet room above the dry goods store where I might impart the rudiments of a classical education to their sons and daughters.

A bit of jam quivered at the side of the Professor’s mouth and he pursued it with his tongue. Daughters, he grunted, shaking his head. That was my downfall. He looked at Lydy, who was swallowing the last of the apple. Are you aware of the lamentable fact that flogging and ear cropping are still common punishments in this benighted part of the world?

I knowed that. Lydy tossed the apple core to the corner of the cell. And there’s brandin too. Sheriff said that iffen the jury brings in manslaughter agin me, they’ll not hang me, only hold the iron to the palm of my hand whilst I sing out God Save the State three times over. He regarded his grimy hand with a stoic gaze. Reckon it’d be better’n hangin.

The Professor grimaced and shook his head. My dear friend, it was not my intention…that is, I never meant…in short, I beg your pardon. Please, let us abandon such dire speculation into the unknowable future and return to the account of your peregrinations. You came to a drovers’ stand and there you were made welcome by the daughter of the house…

Hit was Luellen Gudger that I seen at the river. Lydy’s voice slid back into the dreaming tone that had characterized his tale on the previous evening. She was the finest gal I ever seen with that smooth yaller hair and white skin and her pink dress for Sundays…And she had this little gigglin laugh, put me in mind of the sound of the creeks in midsummer. I thought that her daddy might not want her takin up with no hired man but I seen right soon that he didn’t give no thought to that atall—his mind was turned to his wife and the son he was so sure she’d give him atter she got cured at the Warm Springs.

His name was Lucius Gudger, called Ol’ Luce by most folks, and, just like his daughter, he kindly took to me right off.

Chapter 10

Cletus and the Bad Boys

Wednesday, December 13

E
lizabeth rapped on the storm door of Miss Birdie’s house. From within she could hear, not the usual murmur of the television, tuned to her neighbor’s favorite “stories,” but the plaintive strains of an Appalachian ballad.

Come all ye good people and hear my sad tale;

My time it draws nigh and my soul it doth quail.

I’d have you take warning, take warning of me

If murder you’ve done, then you must pay the fee.

Peering through the glass of the door, Elizabeth rapped again. A small artificial Christmas tree was atop the silent television, lights winking merrily. At the far end of the room, a shelf full of framed family photographs displayed dozens of Christmas cards and a glass candy jar in the shape of a snowman, half-full of red and green jelly beans.

While still a young lad I grew restless at home,

Weary of farming and eager to roam.

I followed my fancy, I followed my dream,

All down the high mountain and along the broad—

A plump little woman bustled out of the kitchen, a dishtowel in one hand. Beckoning to Elizabeth, Miss Birdie Gentry made for the tape player and stabbed at a button, cutting the singer off in mid-verse.

“Come in outen the cold, Lizzie Beth, and git you a chair. I most didn’t hear you fer all the racket.” Miss Birdie’s eyes sparkled in her wrinkled face as she beamed up at Elizabeth. “Law, honey, hit’s good to see you.”

“Hey, Miss Birdie.” Elizabeth leaned down to hug her old friend. “Who was that singing?” She unwrapped her long blue muffler and pulled off her pea jacket. “They sound really good.”

“Why, that’s Josh and Sarah Goforth. They was foolin’ around at home and their mommy Peggy made that tape for me. She knows how I like to hear them old love songs—my mamaw could sing like one thing; had I don’t know how many of them old songs by heart. She tried to teach me but I couldn’t never seem to sound tuneful-like.”

Birdie dropped onto her vinyl-covered recliner. “I reckon you probably heard of Peggy’s boy Josh—they was a piece in the paper just the other day. That young un kin play the banjo and the fiddle and most any other thing you can name. He’s a real musicianer, got his own band and travels all over. Now, Sarah, she sings at church and she—”

“Goforth? I’ve just been reading about a Goforth—back before the Civil War. Something to do with the old house at Gudger’s Stand.”

“Ay law, Lizzie Beth honey, they’s been Goforths in this part of the county long past reckonin’. All up and down Bear Tree Creek, for the most part.” Birdie screwed up her face in an effort of memory. “But I don’t believe as I ever heared of any at Gudger’s Stand. That stand house and land has always belonged to Revises. Besides, the Goforths is all good churchgoin’ folk—not the kind to git mixed up with something like that sinful place.”

Birdie quivered with indignation. “Why, Lizzie Beth”—her voice was lowered a notch, as befitting secret scandal—“before old man Revis got hisself killed, that stand house was no better than a tavern…or worse.”

Elizabeth nodded. Marshall County had been officially “dry” for years, but it was well known that those who lacked the means or the time to travel to the next county could always find a back room somewhere in which beer or hard liquor was sold at inflated prices.

“What else can you tell me about the stand, Birdie? I just recently met a Miss Barrett who lives in Dewell Hill. She’s the cousin—or maybe it’s the niece—anyhow, the heir of the man who was murdered there at Gudger’s Stand—”

“Miss Nola Barrett? The one what lives in the little stone house acrost from the garbage place?”

“You know her?”

“Well, not to say
know.
Of course, they
was
right much talk about her, when she was the one what found old man Revis, but
I
never believed none of it. Nola Barrett’s a good-hearted somebody, and that’s the truth. It was her what called me about Cletus, that time those no-good fellers done him so bad.”

Cletus, Miss Birdie’s only child, had been dead for several years now. His last photograph, taken on his forty-first birthday, only months before his death, occupied a place of honor flanked by praying ceramic angels atop the crowded shelf. His simple, childlike face smiled out at his widowed mother.

“What no-good fellows, Birdie? And when was this?”

“Let me see now…hit would have been back in ’95 and in the fall of the year, for Cletus was out on one of his huntin’ trips—you know how that boy roamed—and, as I recollect, he’d been gone several days. Hit was early one morning I got a phone call—I had wrote the phone number on his knapsack, for he couldn’t never remember hit—and there was this Miss Barrett sayin’ as Cletus was at her house and wantin’ me to come git him.”

“But how could he have—”

“How come him to be over there acrost that river when he was flat skeered to
death
to walk on that bridge? That’s what set me to worryin’. He hadn’t told Miss Barrett ary thing and he wouldn’t talk to me on the telephone—you know how backward he was about a phone—just couldn’t make out how it worked.”

So Birdie had driven the short distance to Dewell Hill, where she had found her son finishing a hearty breakfast in Nola Barrett’s kitchen. Cletus had refused to answer her questions, by the simple expedient of ducking his head and taking another helping of scrambled eggs.

“Miss Barrett told me she seen him when she looked out her window at first light. He was hunched down there against the gate to the garbage place. Hit worried her so she went out and asked him was he all right, and Cletus told her he was waitin’ there for his mommy. Pore thing, he knowed I always come by there everwhen I went to the grocery. But this was on a Sunday and my day fer goin’ out was Thursday.”

“Did he ever tell you how he came to be there?”

“Not at first he wouldn’t, but as we was nearin’ the bridge, he begun to tremble like he always done. And like always, I done told him that we’d get acrost jest fine and if he’d shet his eyes, I’d tell him when we was over. But then I seen hit weren’t the bridge he was a-skeered of—hit was something down there in the field behind them old shackledy buildings. Cletus was all to pieces and he kept pointing down there and sayin’, ‘Bad boys! Bad boys!’”

“It’s pretty cold but at least there’s no wind. I’ve got a sleeping bag to put around me. And the sky’s perfectly clear. I’m going to watch for a while anyway.”

“The Geminids, is it?” Phillip sounded dubious but amused. “Are there supposed to be lots of them?”

Elizabeth settled herself into a rocking chair moved from the front porch to the deck below for the occasion. She held the phone to her ear as she scanned the sky to the north. “Well, ten to fifteen an hour is the estimate—so that works out to one every four to six minutes—not exactly a light show but—Oh! There went one!”

A pinpoint of light flared in the soft blackness of the sky’s depth, tracing a brief glowing path that disappeared before her sentence was completed. At the top of the heavens’ vault, in the deepest darkness, the sky was crowded with a thickly glittering maze of stars, while the eastern horizon was a hazy purple, tinged by a faint glimmering from the lights of Ransom and the surrounding communities.

Wish on a falling star. I wish that Phillip were here instead of in Weaverville. I wish that that Nola would get well. I wish…

“I wish
I
could see them,” Phillip’s rueful tone almost sounded sincere, “but with so many security lights in Weaverville, there’s no chance. I’ll just have to stay here in my warm house and let you describe it to me.”

“You seem to be bearing up pretty well under the disappointment.” Elizabeth switched the phone to her left ear and shoved her right hand, icy in spite of the heavy glove, into her pocket. “I don’t know how long I’ll be out here—I always hope that it’ll be a real meteor shower—like that song about stars falling on Alabama—with the sky just full of—I think there went another one just at the edge of my vision!”

“How was Miss Birdie? You did say you were going to visit her today, didn’t you?”

“Birdie’s great—she asked after you.”
How is that feller of yours?
Miss Birdie had asked, fixing Elizabeth with a shrewd gaze.
Now I don’t mean to be nosy, Lizzie Beth, but seems to me, like my mamaw used to say, you could go farther and fare worse. He’s a fine man and a body kin see he thinks the world of you.
“Maybe you could come with me when I take her some Christmas goodies next week. What did Mackenzie want to see you about—if it’s not privileged information.”

“Well—it’s not common knowledge yet, but I trust you not to let this go any farther. You ever noticed that old school bus, parked in the field below the bridge?”

Elizabeth listened with growing uneasiness as Phillip described the anonymous letter and the alleged rape in the old bus.

“Phillip, this is too weird. Birdie was just telling me this story about her son. It was back—I can’t remember exactly when she said; I think it was in the early nineties—Cletus was more or less abducted by some young men.”

“That poor young un,” Miss Birdie had said. “I remember it jest as plain. ‘They was bad boys, Mommy,’ says he. I finally got it out of him that he’d been over yon side of Pinnacle, sleepin’ in an old barn he used sometimes. Howsomever, what he told me was that these fellers come hoo-rahin’ around and when they found him there, they made him drink with them. Now Cletus hadn’t never had no whisky and he said he got sick and started to vomick and then they said they’d bring him home.”

Miss Birdie’s eyes had grown misty and her voice wavered as she said, “You know what Cletus was—one of the Lord’s innocent lambs. Well, he got in the truck with those fellers and he said when they got to the bridge he told ’em to turn up thisaway but they didn’t pay him no mind. He said they was laughin’ and the truck was halfway acrost the bridge and he started to vomick again. They made him get out, right there on the bridge, and he said he got all swimmie-headed and fell down.”

Elizabeth shivered in spite of the sleeping bag wrapped around her. “Poor Birdie, she was almost in tears telling me about this. Evidently between the whisky and his phobia about bridges, Cletus passed out. But this is the weird part. He told her that when he woke up, he was in this old school bus—on a mattress with a girl asleep beside him and the ‘bad boys’ were all gone. He told Birdie that the girl wouldn’t wake up and that she didn’t have any clothes on and he got real scared. He broke a window to get out and started running.”

The slow-moving lights of a distant, silent airplane held Elizabeth’s attention briefly.
One more, when I see one more, then I’m going in and get warm.

Phillip, suddenly sounding very far away, broke into her concentration. “Did Miss Birdie do anything to check on this story—did she believe her son?”

“She believed him—but she figured it was just some drunken kids trying to have fun by seeing what Cletus’s reaction would be to a naked girl.
They was more than one whore woman hangin round that old stand and they was as bad to drink as the men. I don’t doubt but she was in on the joke. My sweet boy had to put up with a world of hatefulness like that.

“Maybe that was all it was—or maybe it’s connected to this story Mac told me.” Phillip’s voice was thoughtful. “But unless the one who wrote that letter contacts him again, we’ll never know.”

“It makes me sad to think of how mean some people can be—especially to harmless creatures like Cletus.” Elizabeth silently noted the passage of another meteor. She pushed herself out of the chair and headed for the steps. Her knees felt stiff and arthritic…and old. “I’m going in the house now. I’ve enjoyed as much as I can stand of the Geminids.”

The phone still to her ear, she opened the front door, savoring the instant, enveloping warmth. Molly looked up briefly from her spot on the sofa in front of the fire, but Ursa, stretched out on the kitchen floor, didn’t move. A rapid tattoo announced that James was on the hearthrug.

A welcoming, pleasant room but something was missing. Almost without thinking, she found herself saying, “I wish you were here, Phillip.”

There was the sound of throat-clearing and he said, “There was another thing—Mac wants me to come work for him. If I gave up the teaching and went full-time with the sheriff’s department, I’d probably have to move out to Marshall County…”

An unspoken challenge hung in the air. When she had rejected his proposal back in the summer, Phillip had said, quietly and without rancor, “I want to marry you, Elizabeth. I’d like that kind of full-time relationship and commitment. But if you’re not interested, so be it. I won’t keep asking but I won’t change my mind; if you change yours, let me know.” And there the matter had rested, much to Elizabeth’s relief.

The waiting silence grew louder and a bevy of conflicting thoughts raced though her head.
Say something…what?

“You could move in, Phillip. We could turn one of the guest rooms into an office for you and—”

“And I could keep my sleeping bag rolled up behind your couch?” The words had a bitter edge. “No thanks, I’ll find a place of my own if I accept Mac’s offer. That way I don’t feel like—Oh hell, Elizabeth, forget I mentioned it.”

There was real irritation in his voice. “I’ll say goodnight now—I’ve got papers to grade and I need to be up early in the morning.”

“Phillip—” A sudden sick feeling swept over her.
Why is marriage so important to him? And why can’t I just go along with it?

“Listen…” She had begun the sentence with no idea of what she was going to say, only hoping desperately to buy a little time. “Please, can we talk about this when you’re out here this weekend?”

A chill silence was the only answer.

“Phillip, you
are
planning on coming out, aren’t you?”
Oh god, why does it have to be like this? Why can’t—

At last the reply came. “Yeah…I guess so. But we don’t need to talk about anything. You know what I want—and I know how you feel.”