Zion (14 page)

“It’s all a lie. It’s just a damned lie,” Tom said. He stood up without thinking. “My wife did no such thing.” He pointed at the marshal with his index finger.

“Tom, please sit on back down,” Brownlow said. “We’re just getting started.”

Tom sat. He appeared ashen, one lone tear emerging from the duct in his right eye and staying there, never falling. His jaw trembled.

“Did you burn down the old Parnell place?” asked the marshal.

“No, I never burned anything, not a single pine tree,” Tom said.

“Do you know who burned down the Parnell place?”

“No.”

“She says Sloan was sleeping with Sara, and she told Jim about it during a phone call one day. Then Jim tricked you into going after Sloan out of pure revenge. Undoubtedly, Jim coaxed you into doing it to cover up for what he’d had done to Sara, maybe. Charity says Jim was championing Sloan’s death—and that either you or he did it alone or both did it in some kind of a conspiracy. I don’t know what to think. Of course, I looked into Sloan’s death back then and found it to be an accident. This is all a bunch of trouble. Now I’ve got to investigate the accusations. I don’t know what to believe, but there’s bound to be some truth in it somewhere. There’s always a little truth in every damned lie. What I’ve got to deal with more than anything is if you had any part of Sloan’s death. That’s the big question I’ve got to answer.”

“The answer is no. Neither James Luke nor I had anything at all to do with Sloan’s death. We were together, but Sloan ran off the road on his own accord, driving ninety to nothing and blind drunk at midnight.”

“Then why in the hell were you at the barroom that night, and why the hell were you in the woods where he wrecked? Y’all were there and following behind him. Jim was a heavy drinker, not you. You’re no barfly. It makes no sense to me.”

“I was there to see if he had my father’s stolen pocket watch. I got an anonymous call from a woman that I couldn’t identify by listening to her voice. Until this day, I’ve had no idea who called me. Now I know.”

“Did Parnell have it?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And you tried to kill him over it? Or was it over what he did to Sara?”

“Neither. He was drunk and ran off the road. He didn’t even know we were anywhere behind him.”

“But had he not run off the road, what were you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Y’all were ramming him with your truck bumper, weren’t you?”

“No, I said he drove the Scout so fast we weren’t anywhere near him. The motor must have been hopped-up or something. We were at least a half-mile behind him when he ran straight through the “T” at Lizard Bayou and Joe Bageant Road and out into the woods. We couldn’t have caught up to him if we’d wanted to.”

“How sure are you of this?”

“Dead sure.”

 “Well, we sure have us a dead man, so being dead is plenty appropriate. What about Jim and your wife?”

Tom grew quiet, stiff, and his eyes watered more. The story carried a devilish sting. “I don’t believe it. I don’t see how it makes any sense. I just can’t believe it. How does this Charity woman know any of this to be true?”

The marshal shrugged. “Charity is the underbelly of Baxter Parish, and she’s gone from the bottom to the top. Crazy? Yes. A liar? Uh-uh. But like I said, there’s a kernel of truth to it. She says Parnell did some confessing of his own to her. His tongue tended to run free when he got some whiskey on it, she said, which is true.”

“I can’t believe a word of it. It defies all common sense, everything I know to be true.”

“Tom, there was a lot of peculiar things happening in the ’60s. Things went upside down. I barely understand it all myself. Hell, somebody told me the other day that J. Edgar Hoover wore a dress and was queer as a three-dollar bill. The man that told me this had a brother that worked for the FBI. My God, Tom! J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in a dress? What in the hell was happening back then?”

“I agree, some things went haywire back in the 1960s, but that doesn’t mean my wife ran around with these men. At the time, James Luke was my best buddy. And my wife sleeping with some shitbird like Sloan doesn’t add up. Charity came to you with all of that crap because I wouldn’t build them a set of shelves and cabinets at their house on Thomas Jefferson Avenue. I turned down a job at their place on Monday of last week. It got kind of nasty at the college barbeque on Friday, too. They took mortal offense to my not accepting the job.”

“So y’all had some kind of disagreement?”

“We did. This past week was a circle in Dante’s hell.”

“Dante?” A puzzled look came across the marshal’s face. “Look, I don’t mean none of this is absolutely true. I surely don’t. I’m not accusing anybody of nothing. But there’s some questions arising that ain’t nobody has ever asked. As a matter of business, where was James Luke the day your wife was attacked?”

Tom was gray-faced, too shocked to be angry. His hands were limp and wet with sweat in his lap. “I recall he was off from work that day. It never was clear what he was doing. I never asked.”

“You sure?”

“I remember clearly that he was off work. That much I know.”

“Didn’t he divorce Nelda soon after?”

“Yes, he did. He left town a few months after the attack on Sara. They divorced, and he moved to Baton Rouge.”

“Why’d they part ways?”

“The story that was passed around was that he was cavorting with some woman at the highway barn from what I recall, a secretary or something, and Nelda found out. Again, that’s what I understood at the time. They split up. Nelda married two years after they divorced and lives in Dahlonega, Georgia, with her second husband.”

“Where’s Jim living now?”

“I never heard from him since he left, but I was told he’s a bigwig with the Army Corps of Engineers in Natchez or Vicksburg, Mississippi.”

“Tom, I mean no disrespect to your wife and family, but I’ve got to get to the bottom of this thing before Charity goes to the Parnells about Sloan’s death and stirs up something from bad to worse. I’d just as soon you keep a lid on everything.”

“All right. No disrespect taken.” Tom was too shocked to take immediate offense.

“I need to interview your wife.”

“Okay. When?”

“It might be a while. I can’t do a damned thing till I get my ass out of this hospital bed and get my old sea legs back underneath me.”

“I could bring her over here.”

“No, we’ll wait on it. I’ll be in touch. Tom, you give me your word that you won’t talk to her about any of this or talk to anybody else either?”

It was quiet in the hospital room for a moment. He ran a finger over the IV in his hand. The marshal stared at Tom.

Tom buried his face into his hands. “Do I need to go see a lawyer about the wreck that night? Neither I nor James Luke had anything to do with it. Sloan was blind drunk, and went off the road on his own accord. That’s just the way it happened. In fact, I made James Luke call an ambulance when we found Sloan in the pasture.”

“I believe you. I don’t think you need to see no lawyer. It’s consistent with my investigation back in ’64. But I know y’all were up to no good. That doesn’t mean anything illegal took place. No, I don’t reckon you need to go see no lawyer. So have I got your word? You won’t talk to nobody?”

“I’ll keep quiet. I won’t speak to Sara or anyone else.”

“Then don’t say nothing to nobody. But how in the hell did Jim Cate become a bigwig?”

“He had a lot of ambition deep down. He went to the Noah Pickens School of Commerce and Business in Baton Rouge back in the late ’50s for some kind of certificate, and then he went to work for the highway department, and then migrated up to Mississippi. From what I heard, he married a rich man’s daughter in Natchez, after he divorced his second wife. Seems like he was only married to his second wife for a short time. Nelda never had any money to her name, but James Luke married up every time.”

“That’ll do it. Marrying a bigwig’s daughter’ll make you a bigwig as fast as Roger Bannister can run a mile. Been my experience it’s the easiest way in the world to get wealthy in this country.”

About this time, the minister entered the room. As was the local custom, all real conversation stopped when he said, “Hello, gentlemen.”

On Memorial Day, Wesley was glad to find that the downtown hardware store was open for business half a day, as was the hardware and lumberyard owned by the Sicilians on the edge of town near I-55. He got two quotes on the materials for the Claiborne project, and he wrote everything up as a formal bid, putting together the estimate using a typewriter in the Industrial Arts Shop.

He was a young man trying to make his way in the world. The disagreement between Wesley and his father had been brewing over time. It was not just the one thing, though the casual observer might think it was. Rather, it was the many unspoken rifts between father and son over the years that led to this crescendo of resentment and anger. He’d never bucked his father openly. Instead, he took whatever was dished out, always staying quiet no matter the rule or request.

After eating some pork ribs that Nate had cooked for lunch, Wesley drove the Maverick a few blocks through Pickleyville’s streets from the garage apartment to the Claiborne House. He pulled onto Thomas Jefferson Avenue where the Claibornes lived. Several of the houses on the street looked like antebellum mansions, and others were large places with five or six bedrooms, some with guest houses out back for servants. Most places were built in the Midwestern style by merchants who came down the Illinois Central Railroad to recreate a town exactly like the ones they’d left in the Midwest during the 1920s. The houses were built for the merchant class, spacious family homes on large square and rectangular lots similar to the ones they’d parted from in the cold Iowa air as they moved to the sunny Gulf South. Typically, the houses had second stories and some had third floor lofts with windows overlooking the street. These homes were constructed in the heady years before the 1929 Stock Market Crash, and many of the places in Pickleyville had been lost to the banks during the rise of the Great Depression era.

A moment of fear seized Wesley as he turned off the car ignition. At no time after sitting near his father at the picnic had he felt this kind of anxiety. It was choking him. He was both excited to take the plunge toward Charity but also worried about the danger inherent in dealing with a married woman with her reputation. He might have disagreed with his father about the woman and the job, but he knew his father couldn’t be completely off base in his assessment of the woman. She was just too forward, too friendly.

He looked across the manicured lawn up to a brick walkway that led to the wooden front door. A plaque stuck into the lawn announced that it was the May 1974 Garden Club award-winning landscape. The door was painted red, almost the same shade as the Mercedes parked under the carport. No other cars were there. He wondered if he should leave the safety of the little Maverick, knowing that there was a dangerous liminal space to cross. He felt like he was seeing a Monet painting where the image was blurred. He no longer saw the closed front door. It opened wide and Charity Claiborne came down the steps to meet him, bounding on her toes like a school girl in the afternoon light. She wore a blue mini-skirt and a tight blouse, and she smiled, calling him out of the car. She insisted on helping him carry his things to the little guest house beside the swimming pool, and she apologized that the daytime workers had gone home and couldn’t assist with the bags. This being a holiday, she let them go home early, she said.

Wesley carried his portfolio and two rucksacks, and she packed a small bag of books. He eased into her domain like a runt wolf lost in an enemy pack’s territory. But for the first time in his life, he felt like a grown man.

Tom grew pensive after the trip to the hospital. On his day off for the holiday, he went to his shop out back early in the morning before Sara awoke. He did not want to see her face. He worked on the cedar chest. The lights were on inside the shop, a bright and crisp contrast to the utter darkness outside. He tried to work into the predawn, but he did more sitting and thinking than actual carpentry.

Few families farmed for a living any longer in Zion. There were a dozen small strawberry farmers out east of Milltown, but that was about it. Only a small fraction of the region was planted compared to a decade before. Some folks kept hobby gardens, but most privately owned farmland was planted in pine trees or overrun with brush, scrub trees like Chinese tallow. A number of local men fished in the lakes nearby, running crab pots in Lake Tickfaw and shrimping in Lake Ponchatoula. Everyone else bought all of their food at National or A & P in Pickleyville, or at Burke’s in Milltown. There was still a fruit stand on Highway 22, and people sold vegetables on the roadside out of the beds of pickup trucks, fruits and vegetables from pickup beds, produce they’d bought elsewhere, often in Mississippi, and sold as retail. One man on Pine Street sold vegetables near the Catholic school. He had a white hand-painted sign that read: THESE VEGETABLES ARE HOMEGROWN… AT SOMEBODY’S HOME. MAY GOD BLESS YALL FOR STOPPING BY.

Now the fortunate people held a state job, and almost no one made their livelihoods from the woods and swamps except for a few timber men. The forests were impassable thickets, no cows or hogs to clean up the underbrush, which became uncontrollable and impenetrable. Fire was the greatest enemy of these thickets, but the burning was fought tooth and nail by the timber companies and the state foresters. In the old days, fire preserved the forest, but not anymore. The risk to the young pines and nearby homes was too great for regular burning. The old longleaf pines were resistant to fire, but not the loblolly. Now houses and trailers could be threatened as the underbrush became a hot flash of burning debris. So the state foresters cut fire lanes throughout the woods with a bulldozer equipped with a large plow on back to make furrows in the ground that would prevent fires from getting out of hand.

Tom could see that the world was going soft. Men began to grow as obese as corn-fed sows. Immobility of body was evidence of opaqueness of mind. Time now fell away with the frivolity of television, which required nothing more than personal isolation and consumption. Little good was left to be accomplished in a given day except waiting for death.

Because locals no longer worked on farms, ran cattle, or tended their gardens, men became interested in the timewaster called “mowing the lawn” with little toy tractors. Loud and obnoxious substitutes for real John Deere farm tractors. Tom realized that in due course these people would only have violence to entertain them.

He picked up his claw hammer. His nails were in the cotton pouch tied around his waist. He fastened a decorative strip to the front of the chest with some small brads. The claw hammer was a tool he’d used for many years. It had a hickory handle that had been strangely notched when he bought it at an estate sale in Ruthberry for two bits. He never knew why there were carved notches, the grooves placed in the handle near the butt end like mementos cut into pistol grips. He knew such a tool could become a formidable weapon if not being used for its intended purpose. In a state of purposelessness, any good tool could become a weapon. If folks quit caring and let the land return to weeds, stopped tending their own spiritual and physical home places and gardens, Tom believed, even a claw hammer became nothing better than a tool for evil. He wondered what was going on in the world.

However, Tom understood some change was necessary and good. Yet not all change was right. Much of what he read in the Pickleyville
Star-Ledger
was nothing more than Chamber of Commerce ideology and feel-good nonsense. There were some other changes he could not agree to, the general lack of respect that had overtaken society. Tom wished these changes to the community had never taken place. It was the death of neighborliness and familial love that seemed the worst of all. The death of common courtesy. He believed it started with the Vietnam War, a program of conquest that sought nothing less than to rip the country to shreds.

He opposed the war quietly, which bothered him sometimes. He was not showy and never considered going to a war protest. There was only one protest in Baxter Parish, back when General Westmoreland came to the junior college in 1968. Eight people showed up with placards and were run off by the ROTC. In disgust over Westmoreland’s invited speech, Tom stayed at the Ponderosa during the general’s visit and never left the building despite being asked to attend by his foreman.

In a manila folder, he kept a couple dozen letters, letters to his senators and congressmen over Vietnam, typed letters written on Sara’s little Olivetti, a letter a year to the elected officials since J.F.K. had been President, all to no avail. It seemed that only a total lack of will by politicians to pay for the war itself could do any good. His vain letters were mailed but received no reply. He couldn’t even bring peace to his own family, much less stop a war in Southeast Asia.

Tom was happy that his son would not have to go to the deadly war. He was no pacifist but could never wrap his mind around this conflict in Indochina. When he joined the navy, he could commit himself to stopping Hitler and Tojo, but he never could reach the slightest understanding of the war in Vietnam. He couldn’t understand it no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he gave his government the benefit of the doubt.

It was the American struggle against the war, too, that lowered the threshold for temperance and respect. It was as if all sense of propriety went missing from the country. How could any person cry, “Burn baby burn!” like they did in Watts? He could not fathom it. Either the seeds of McCarthyism or Woodstock were coming home to roost, maybe both.

In all of the freedom talk and harping on civil rights, he saw little progress, the exception being the ability of blacks to register to vote, go to a decent school, and avoid a lynch mob. He could see very little forward progress in the world. Though he was in favor of civil rights, an inevitable and a necessary change to society, he believed it was the failure of the American Way of Life not to end slavery over 100 years ago and head off the bloody Civil War. Now the common good went nowhere beyond a person’s self-interest. No sense of purpose, no sense of hope, no sense of shared destiny. There was no public sense that to harm a neighbor is to harm oneself.

These chaotic times were truly cruel and hard on a man’s soul, times when son took arms against father. In general, folks acted as though they were happy, but Tom thought their happiness was a false light in a dying and darkened world. His family, he thought, had enjoyed happiness for years before Sara’s rape, but since that time he’d seen a harsher world, more daily pain, a hard world with less mercy in it, less love and little honor. Upon hearing the words from Marshal Brownlow at the hospital, he wondered if everything he understood about his family life was a sham, a mere charade, maybe just another gigantic American lie like Vietnam.

He and the family always seemed to look over their shoulders since 1964, unconsciously looking back at the trouble that haunted them. Perhaps a time was coming for another shoe to drop. Tom realized that the shoe was already dropping when the marshal told him of James Luke Cate’s possible connection to his wife’s assault. Maybe it was Charity offering her little confession that caused hell to make a personal visit to Zion. He wondered if this current trouble was going to be the final blow as he stared at his hammer about to tap down the little brad into the cedar wood.