Strawman's Hammock (22 page)

He fell howling and cursing to the floor.

And for a moment Barrett did not know what to do.

“You … little … fuckin' bastard…”

His father was heaving erect. Reaching for his belt.

“Wait…'til I get…'hold o' you!”

Down came the bat as if Barrett was splitting kindling. The father's skull turned directly into the path of the Louisville Slugger. Thirty-two ounces of hardwood smashed Randall Grant Barrett's brain to mush.

Barrett didn't stop with the first blow. Or the second. His mother had to pull her son, screaming, from off his father.

“Oh, my Jesus!” the mother wailed.

Then a woman was there, a stranger, but someone he had heard described in hushed conversation.

“Jolene, you got to git up.” The command came quietly.

She was old. Looked like straight off a slave ship. Ramrod stiff and strong, with one of those bandannas tied up on her head, the knots standing up like ears on an Easter bunny.

She walked calmly into the room and knelt beside his father.

“Awright,” she declared as if satisfied. And then turned to Barrett.

“Sad thang when a boy has t' do what men ought.”

That was when Barrett smelled the smell. It was deep with odors familiar from childhood, but mixed in unnatural combination.

The pouch waved like a censer from her neck and the crone's voice became suddenly distant.

“Let him pass. Best thang.”

The crone was walking then, it seemed to Barrett, in the direction of their kitchen.

“Jolene,” she said. “I want you to gimme a knife.”

*   *   *

He must have fainted, because the next clear memory unfolding from this box was the smell of urine on the pallet they always kept in hot weather on the porch. A crow was sitting on the bleach bottle on the fence beside their gate. Yellow eyes. Evil.

“Ain't time fuh you yet,” the old crone spoke from the yard and the bird cawed away.

Barrett rose to see Sheriff Witt's police-packaged Dodge parked beneath the pecan tree out front. The old and unfamiliar woman stood with his mother, foot shuffling as older Negroes were wont to do before a capricious authority.

“I just got my face stitched from last time…” Barrett's mother was saying.

“I got that part,” the sheriff nodded impatiently. “And then he came at you with—what'd you say?”

“A knife.” Barrett's puissant angel interposed to display a butcher knife red with blood.

His mother displayed her arm stiffly, as if on cue.

The sheriff frowned at the single, easy slice.

“Randall, he cut her,” Hezikiah insisted. “I come up, I saw him cuttin'. Thought he was comin' fuh me. Then Jolene took up the club.”

“You mean the baseball bat.”

“Yassuh. And Randall, he turned back on her with the knife and got hisself a good one, right across the head. But it din' keep him down.”

“Oh, it didn't?”

“Nawsuh. He still comin' with dat knife. Jolene, she had to hit him coupla mo' time good before he stay.”

“So you're saying he would have killed her.”

“He tried befo', ask Doc Hardesty.”

The sheriff made a note. A pair of deputies lounged nearby. One of them bent to the earth.

“What's this?”

“Corncob dart.” The words came unbidden from Barrett's mouth.

The sheriff seemed to notice Barrett for the first time. Barrett recalled the smell of leather in his belt as the lawman ambled over to the porch. His handgun was huge, much larger than the secondhand toy Barrett used to bust caps. He wore a pleasant smile as he leaned over the porch's ledge.

“You see any of this, son?”

“Some of it.”

“He were in the closet,” the mother spoke up. “Randall thowed him in.”

“So you couldn't see much,” the sheriff coached.

Barrett shook his head.

“I could hear.”

The sheriff nodded. “Yes, boy. I bet you could.”

The smile faded. The sheriff rose indolently, nodded to his deputies.

“Check with Doc. If he vouches for the beatin's I'd say we have a plain-old case of self-defense.”

Barrett's mother remained uncomprehending.

“Self—?”

“You ain't guilty of a crime when you defend yourself, Miz Raines,” the sheriff explained. “Plus the boy was at risk, too. I'm not gonna waste the county's money or my time worryin' over a nigger lost his head while tryin' to gut his wife.”

Barrett realized that the old, ancient woman was staring straight at him.

“The daddy watn't worth much—”

She prounounced it deadpan, as if in a trance.

“—but that young'un gonna
be
somebody.”

The sheriff did not reply.

“Come on boys,” he said. “Let's wind this up.”

There were no body bags in those years. They just drug him out. Hoisted him into the back of a truck. The truck was well down the road before Barrett first and truly realized that he had killed his father.

And that he was going to get away with it.

*   *   *

Barrett emerged from the trailer to find his partner anxious outside.

“You all right, Bear?” Cricket asked.

The air came now in deep cold drafts. His heart was calm. His chest was light. The sky seemed more open, even through the clouds, than it had been in years.

“Bear?”

“I'm okay, Cricket.”

Bear suspected that The Dream was exorcized, now, along with the memory. Perhaps even some of the fear that came with it. But the memory of his hidden slaughter was now revealed in open daylight.

Who else knew?

Barrett, until this very morning, had repressed the fact of the killing. His mother was dead—had she ever told anyone? Probably not. Especially since she lied to cover for her son.

That left the old woman. The crone. Who was she? The smell was the clue.

“Cricket,” Barrett spoke up.

“Right here.”

“There's some kind of paste in the bedroom. Be sure and remind me to get it to Midge. I'm pretty sure she's going to find it matches that mess the lab found in the victim's vagina.”

“You think the Bull and his niece were getting treatment from the same quack?”

Barrett shrugged. “Maybe.”

He couldn't tell Cricket that he knew who had made the awful paste. He couldn't tell his partner about the ancient slave woman. He certainly couldn't afford to tell anyone that the
curandero
who divined potions of dog fennel and snake skins was also the woman who knew that Barrett Raines killed his own father.

That was not the kind of history, even if justified, that got you elected to sheriff in a white man's county.

“You all right, Barrett?” Jarold asked.

“Just secure the scene,” Bear replied shortly. “I'll be fine.”

Twelve

In the days that followed the Bull's death, Barrett Raines had time to ponder the significance of his recently recovered memory. A doubting Thomas by nature, Bear told himself that he was not obligated to trust his vision, that there was no way to judge the veracity of his violently recalled past. How could he have repressed such a memory? How reliable were memories suddenly recovered? Was it possible that his potion-triggered recollection was not reliable at all? For years Barrett had believed his mother had killed his father. That was the official story, and until his recent epiphany that was what Barrett believed.

His new memory, on the other hand, registered with the conviction of an eyewitness, made Barrett his father's killer. Bear was not worried about the ethical or even legal dimension of his patricide. Randall Grant Raines was in the process of battering his mother. The father's violence was repeated and escalating. A jury would not likely find the son guilty of anything more than self-defense.

But a jury never heard the case, and that bothered Barrett greatly. The truth, whatever it was, had been covered up to protect him from a white man's justice. Hezikiah had seen to that.

Yes, Barrett knew her name. Even as a boy he had heard stories about a crazy woman who caught lizards and snakes and took in people who had given up on tent revivals and Billy Graham. And the stories of her curses were as vivid as the ones of her healings. How she gave the Odom boy a club foot when he overcharged her at the grocery store. How she took away a woman's child for a debt of fifty cents. Burned houses and dead babies were laid at Hezikiah's feet.

She took credit for them all.

Barrett's urgent questions were personal, but he had an official gloss for approaching the old woman. Hezikiah, after all, was tied to a murder victim and her alleged killer. She might have something to add to the case. He had a rough idea where to look for her. Everyone in the African American community, at least, knew that Hezikiah Jackson lived in Strawman's Hammock. That was about as helpful as saying that General Custer could be found in the Dakotas.

Who could Bear ask to help him locate the old woman? Whom could he trust? Bear turned to Jarold Pearson. Barrett explained that the Bull and his niece were being treated for venereal disease by Hezikiah, and that Bear would like to see what the old woman knew of the uncle and his niece.

“You got any idea where to find her?” Bear asked.

“Sure,” Jarold affirmed. “It's on the north side of the property from where we found the girl.”

So once again Barrett was belted in beside the game warden, crashing through undergrowth and dodging bogs to follow a trail that wound into the bowels of Strawman's Hammock. December had come with a precipitous dip of mercury. The lowlands were spectacular this morning, the region's heavy dew gone to frost overnight, laying a virgin mantle in convoluted splendor on wild grapevines and ragweed and dog fennel. Even the palmettos were fringed with frost. The air was crisp. Barrett breathed deeply, all the way down.

No wearies this morning.

They skirted the pond this time, following what looked like a foot trail that gradually widened to two sandy ruts.

“Been traveled some,” Jarold remarked.

“Who comes out here?” Barrett asked.

Jarold shrugged. “All I hear is that black people think she's some kind of shaman and Mexicans think she's a witch.”

“Little of both, I 'magine,” Bear replied.

Jarold registered silent surprise at that response.

*   *   *

It took close to half an hour of winding around to reach her shack. If there had been a single turn off that scrap of road Barrett would have been instantly lost.

“Only one road in,” Jarold nodded. “Trick is, of course, to find the one road.”

“There it is.”

Her home. Less than a sharecropper's shack, it nestled beneath a riot of trees, a corrupted box of tin and cypress centered in a yard of white sand. A single field fence surrounded it. Rough pine stumps were visible below the decrepit porch and floorbeams. A pah of mimosa trees untouched by frost draped the porch in blossoms out of season, a riot of pink in late November. Like a Chinaman's umbrella.

“You mind waiting for me?” Barrett asked.

“I'll be napping,” Jarold replied, rolling down his window and easing back. “Don't startle me when you come back.”

*   *   *

“Hezikiah Jackson.” Barrett stopped on the top step leading onto her porch. “Hezikiah.”

“No need t' shout.”

He jumped, startled, to find a woman older than his dreams materialized, apparently, at his elbow.

“Hezikiah?”

“Who you 'spect?”

“Miz Jackson, I am—”

“You the Bear, I know you. Knew your mama. Knew your daddy.”

“Daddy, yes. Actually, I'd like to talk about that, if you don't mind.”

“Took you long enough. Come in.”

She was wearing only the thinnest shawl over a shift so thin that in places her flesh was visible. A winter breeze shook the slats on her cypress shack like a death rattle.

She took him to what ought to have been a kitchen. A filthy gas stove was there. A sink. No electricity. A single kerosene heater glowing bright. Barrett noted a pair of arrowheads strung with what looked like fishline and hung from the ceiling, but it was the artifacts secured on the walls that kept his attention.

There were shelves floor to ceiling on the walls of Hezikiah's kitchen, and not a nail to hold them in place. Just irregular columns of whiskey bottles. Jar after jar lined those rude cabinets, none filled with things you might expect. Hezikiah, it seemed, did not spend her time pickling lima beans or acre peas.

Barrett could not take his eyes off what he strongly suspected to be a human tongue that floated murkily in a Bell jar. He pulled his chair to her flimsy table, rested his hands carefully. How could he start?

“You killed him,” she said.

“What was that?”

“You heard me,” she said.

And Barrett realized that he had.

“He was going to hurt mother.”

She nodded.

“He was going to kill her.”

“He didn't have a knife,” Barrett offered in correction.

“Don' take a knife to kill a person, Bear. A word can kill. The right word. From the right mouth.”

A sudden chill ran down Bear's back. He needed to reroute this interview.

“You ever have a girl come in here, Hezikiah? Latin girl.” Barrett reached for the sketch folded in his pocket.

“I don't need a pitcher,” she said scornfully. “I got nuthin' to hide.”

“You treated her?”

The old woman smiled. “She was a purty thang. But et up with clap. He had it too.”

“Her uncle?”

“Was that it? I knew it was somethin'. He was a hard man to read. A man, though. I can tell you that.” She cackled. “We had some fun times. Right on this table.”

“Sheriff's convinced The Bull had fun killing his niece. My partner's convinced. I'm not.”