Zion (5 page)

While Sara slept, Tom stood in the kitchen cutting onions. He was cooking, baking potatoes and a pork roast in the oven, picking up the slack in the housework. This was the first time he’d kept house since their marriage. Corrine cooked a little. Nelda helped out. So did Martina and a few others, women from the Methodist church, friends and family in the Zion community. Mostly, folks brought food to the house ready to eat, but they never ventured beyond the front porch.

Sara slept in the bedroom, an oral tranquilizer causing her to breathe with shallow breaths, the sound of a whisper floating from her dry lips. On days when Tom had to go to work, Martina or Corrine stayed with her all day, and this made Tom feel a little better. She told him the pills chased away the dark shadows, cloudy images of being attacked. Still, when she slept, sometimes the certainty of death visited her dreams, and she’d awake screaming and fighting a ghost.

The phone on the wall rang. Tom dropped the kitchen knife into the sink, wiping his hands on a rag, grabbing the phone just as the third ring hit the first note. He answered it saying, “Hello. Hardin residence.” He spoke softly, hoping the noise wouldn’t wake his wife.

“Is this Tom Hardin?” the woman asked. Her voice was sweet and youthful sounding.

“Yes. Who’s speaking?”

“I can’t say. But I need to tell you that Sloan Parnell was the one that raped your wife. He did it to her on account that you whipped him.”

“Ma’am, how do you know this?” Tom massaged his temple with his partially wet left hand.

“Sloan talks a lot when he’s drinking heavy, and he’s always drinking heavy.”

“Who is this?”

“I can’t tell you. The Parnells are powerful people. And I’m scared.”

“How do I know it’s true? I don’t even know who you are.”

“He told me your dog bit his left forearm bad, and it’s not healed. He said your father’s pocket watch is under his truck seat. It’s inscribed with Ansel Earl Hardin on it. Sometimes he gets drunk and calls me.”

“I’m not missing my daddy’s watch.”

“You’d better go check, Tommy.”

He was stunned. Almost no one ever called him “Tommy” except for a small circle of friends and neighbors. He couldn’t place the voice, and he didn’t think the old watch was missing. He kept it in his top dresser drawer. It was there the last time he checked, as best he could recall.

“Lady, why are you telling me all of this?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Sara deserves a little mercy for something she did a while back. And the Lord’s been dealing with me, chastising me for some sinful ways in my life. He’s been speaking to me, talking to me in my prayer times. The Lord said she didn’t deserve what she got. But I better go now. I’ve told you all the Lord put on my heart to say.”

The phone went dead. Tom held it to his ear a few seconds and then hung up.

He went into the bedroom where Sara slept, trying not to disturb her.

She spoke without opening her eyes, sounding startled. “Tommy, is that you?”

“Yes, I’m looking for a handkerchief.”

He searched the chest of drawers, but the watch was gone. He considered whether he should go directly to Brownlow but decided against it. What would it accomplish anyway? The marshal either wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything, and Sloan might destroy the evidence linking him to the crime.

Tom contemplated killing Sloan, perhaps shooting him with a .308 rifle, his old Savage 99 lever action deer rifle. Shoot him from the highway as he walked out of his front door to go drinking. Or maybe sucker him into a fistfight and take an oak stick to him, not quitting until the man died. These were twisted images that he sought to dispel from his mind, but the violent vision lingered despite his best efforts.

He studied it a while, considered it all. He would make a reasonable plan to deal with the knowledge and do something. In the meantime, he needed to verify that the watch was still in Sloan’s possession.

Tom called Nelda and asked her if she’d be willing to come over and relieve him of his care-giving. He asked her if James Luke was home, and she said he was. Nelda and Tom swapped shifts looking after Sara. Wesley was over at Corrine’s house.

When Nelda arrived, Tom drove over to James Luke’s house. When he got there, dogs started barking, two yellow curs running from James Luke’s barn, a small pole barn that sagged a little in the middle.

From inside the barn, Tom heard a sharp whistle and the dogs settled down a bit. There was nothing moving at the barn, though James Luke’s truck was parked beside the building. Tom buttoned his denim jacket. The barn door opened, and James Luke stuck his head out and waved, hollering at the dogs. Tom walked over and found that James Luke was pouring out wheat shorts to feed some small pigs he’d gathered from the woods. The pigs fought over the food, squealing and tussling.

“Damned things are crazy as all hell. I’d say they’re feral and would eat me if I fell in the trough.” James Luke grinned.

“Yeah, hogs are killers, but not that young,” Tom said.

“Hell, years ago I saw a hog eating a half-alive calico cat in a thunderstorm. Old hog carried the cat out into our yard and was eating it under an oak tree. I shot the hog and killed it, but there was no way I was going to eat it after what he had done to the cat.”

“That’s sick,” Tom said, standing with his hands in his pockets. He’d heard the tale once before but doubted its veracity.

“You need something, friend?” James Luke asked.

“Uh-huh,” Tom said, stalling a couple of seconds, and then he launched into the story, telling James Luke about the phone call and the pocket watch and the marks left from the dog attack.

James Luke appeared taken aback, one hand gripping the rope handle of his bucket, the other holding a cigarette. “Sloan Parnell is a no-good sumbitch. If he did that to your wife, he deserves some pain. He’ll just do it again. Let’s go get his sorry ass right now,” James Luke said, his face red with anger.

“No, I just need to see if he has Daddy’s watch in the vehicle and decide what to do next,” Tom said.

Earlier in the year, James Luke had a rift with P.T. Parnell over some money. The elder Parnell had been James Luke’s former drinking buddy, and he was some kind of business partner in a venture to raise giant sinker cypress logs from Lake Tickfaw and sell them to the state under Governor Davis, a kickback scheme that Tom never could quite understand. On top of this, there was a large tract of land that he was going to buy for the price of the stand of timber, but P.T. bought the property out from under James Luke. He was always working an angle to make money in a side business. Most of the time it was a fly-by-night scam that included taking someone else’s cash. Because James Luke and P.T. had a falling out, he cursed the Parnells daily.

 “Why not go right now?” James Luke said. You want to take after him? I say let’s ride,” James Luke threw his bucket into the feed room where he stored grain in a large steel bin. He took a hard pull on his Camel.

Tom said, “I need more information. Then we can go check his comings and goings, search his truck to see if we can find the old watch.”

“Don’t ass around. I say let’s do something now. He might get rid of the watch. That’s all of the rock solid evidence you ought to need. The dog bite on his arm might heal up, make it an invisible scar.” He gripped a bottle of beer that had been sitting on a 55 gallon oil drum, and swallowed a quarter of it in two gulps.

“I won’t waste any time. But the woman said he’s injured on his left forearm, and Jubal must have latched onto him good, which makes sense with the chain broke and all. I know he’d try to bite the hell out of somebody if he wanted off the chain bad enough to break it.”

“What do you really want to do?”

“I’d like to bring him to justice.”

James Luke sneered. “Justice. What’s that supposed to be in this godforsaken place?”

But he never answered.

Tom called the marshal for an update on the investigation. According to Brownlow, Sloan Parnell had a solid alibi. He was in Mississippi cruising a stand of timber all day long for Fitz-Blackwell. He had three nights of hotel receipts from the Rosalie Hotel to prove it, and he was on the company time clock. But the marshal mentioned no eyewitnesses, only Parnell’s word and an assignment sheet, a handwritten timesheet from his job and the hotel tickets.

When the marshal told Tom the alibi, he offered little reaction. The so-called proof did not persuade him one bit. He said, “Mighty fine police work. Thank you and good-bye.”

Tom was sure that Sloan, by nature, was making other enemies. As a representative of Fitz-Blackwell, he would most certainly face opposition from other farmers and hunters out in the woodlands, the many fires being clear proof of an arson conspiracy, and any number of the men could kill him as easily as pulling a trigger. However, in the overall scheme of things, if Sloan turned up dead, Tom did not want to be a prime suspect, so he decided not to tell the marshal about the woman’s phone call.

At the stroke of midnight, Sloan’s family home burned to cinders, the old two-story Parnell place with its dueling cedars at the end of a long driveway. It was torched in the darkness, the stars not glowing, a time when normal people were asleep in bed. But at the witching hour, Sloan was sipping bourbon and Coca-Cola over at the Belt Buckle Lounge. A neighbor drove to the bar and announced that the house was consumed in flames. Sloan had inherited it when his Uncle Bixby Parnell died of a brain aneurism two years earlier. At one time, the home was insured by Lloyd’s of London, but Sloan had failed to renew the policy earlier in the year. Instead of mailing the premium, he bought the services of a string of prostitutes on Plank Road in Baton Rouge. He was now out of a fine home and seventy acres of young pines, which were also charred to a crisp.

On the day after the old Parnell place burned, Marshal Brownlow was waiting for Tom at the brickyard parking lot at four o’clock when the yard shut down for the day, the time when most of the workers left for the day. He stood beside Tom’s truck.

“How’s Sara?” Brownlow asked as Tom approached.

Tom described Sara’s condition and her constant pain.

“Judge Parnell called me this morning,” the marshal said.

“Is that right?” Tom said. He had heard about the torched home as soon as he got to work, men standing around a burn barrel in the cool morning talking about it, the men trying to stay warm in the chilly air. They were all happy it went up in smoke, but no one claimed responsibility for the blaze.

“That’s right. He called me,” the marshal said.

“Well, was he asking you to go play some golf?” Tom laughed.

“I don’t play no golf.”

“Or was he trying to bribe you?”

“That’s enough, Tom. You’re usually a respectful man. If you don’t respect me personally, at least respect the office.”

“Why are you calling on me today?”

“The judge thinks you burned down Sloan’s house, the old Parnell home place. That’s what Sloan told his grandpa.”

“Marshal, that’s a real serious accusation. Not as serious as rape and attempted murder, though. But you don’t appear too worried about that. Maybe I need to go get a corrupt judge to call you. That might prompt you a little more to hunt down the man that tried to kill my wife.”

“Tom, you’re playing with fire.”

“Not literally.”

“Literally.”

“You got any evidence?”

“I’ve got plenty of motive against you.”

“Motive my ass.” Tom did his best to sound incredulous, and he shrugged his shoulders.

“You believe he was involved. And Sloan Parnell was scared to death of you after the fight y’all got into over at Beam’s feed store, and now he’s mortally fearful after his house burned. Judge Parnell says Sloan’s damn near too scared to leave the place where he’s staying. He won’t hardly go to work. Judge says he’s more or less up day and night at a camp on Lizard Bayou, and he’s about as frightened as a schoolgirl in a lightning storm. He’s drinking heavier than normal, stuck on a barstool at the Belt Buckle when he’s not cowering at the camp.”

Tom took note of where Sloan was convalescing. “Look, there was hardly a fight. He grabbed me, and I knocked the hell out of him a couple of times. I don’t care whether the guy is scared or not. I didn’t burn down his house. Last night I was at home looking after Sara. Sounds to me like he’s either got a guilty conscience or he’s delusional over his own wrongdoing, and I’m about tired of hearing his name come up in every conversation I have.”

“Don’t go anywhere near him. If you do, I’ll have to come after you. I’m going to call on you again about the fire or maybe the state fire marshal will come see you.”

“If you need me, you know where I work and where I live.” Tom got into his truck and drove back home to Zion.

Tom felt especially uneasy after the marshal’s visit, and he was determined to get to the bottom of his wife’s attack. He wanted to seek out the truth. So he drove over to James Luke’s place later that evening near dusk, having made a shift swap with Corrine who stayed at the house to watch Sara. He told Sara that he needed to go help James Luke move some hogs into a lot before it got too late. Tom never made her stay by herself, not yet. He never left without someone else being in the house. She could do things for herself despite the shoulder sling, but he did not want her left by herself or made to feel lonely. Plus there was a dangerous assailant still on the loose, still a free man, and Tom’s primary suspect was Sloan Parnell.

James Luke met Tom in his front yard as he pulled up in his truck.

Tom got out of the truck and had an angry look on his face. “I’m about ready to go pay a visit to Sloan Parnell,” Tom said.

James Luke raised a brow and sneered. “Now you’re talking sense. The sumbitch has been the lead candidate from the start,” he said. “What you got in mind?”

“I don’t know just yet. I need to see if my daddy’s watch is in the drunk’s truck,” Tom said.

“That’ll tell you an awful lot, won’t it?”

“It’ll give me plenty of knowledge.”

“If it’s in there, you gonna tell the marshal about the watch? I’d say it wouldn’t be too wise a thing to do.”

“I don’t think so. It won’t do any good.”

“No, it won’t. Fitz-Blackwell and Sloan’s family have bought the marshal lock stock and barrel. I wouldn’t say jack shit to him. He can’t be trusted.”

“Let’s drive down to Lizard Bayou.”

“All right. Let’s take care of it.”

“He’s drinking himself blind.”

“We can take my truck.”

“Okay.”

They loaded into James Luke’s Chevrolet pickup. Tom noticed the big pearl-handled U.S. Army Colt automatic lying on the seat in a leather flap holster. Neither man said anything about the pistol as James Luke turned the truck onto Lower Louth Road.

There were a dozen cars and trucks in the barroom parking lot. It was dark out. The air was hazy, almost like a dead winter fog, a creepy damp cold. One naked light bulb shone beside the front door of the long clapboard building. The walls were white siding covered with ancient mildew, gray-black with funk. The bar was close to the bayou, and the air carried the dank smell of muddy water.

On the right side of the barroom parking area sat Sloan Parnell’s red and white International Scout, a four-wheel drive truck that resembled a Jeep.

“Pull in beside the Scout,” Tom said.

James Luke stopped beside it.

“Leave the engine idling. Holler at me if somebody comes this way,” Tom said.

“You don’t reckon the truck’s locked?” James Luke asked.

“We’ll see.”

The sounds of a jukebox wafted through the thin pine barroom walls. Tom grabbed the flashlight from the truck seat. He left James Luke’s pickup door ajar despite the cool air, and he opened the Scout door quietly. He shined the flashlight under the driver’s seat, bent down and saw an empty King Edward cigar box without a lid and a half pint of Old Crow. He pulled them out and placed them on the seat, and then he shined the light underneath the passenger side, squinting to see, his cheek pressed against the floorboard. He saw a cotton bag, similar to a flour sack. He reached in and got it. It was chunky feeling and hard. He opened the sack and saw his father’s watch, as well as a nickel-plated derringer with two barrels, which he immediately cracked open. It was loaded with a pair of .22 rounds.

Tom gritted his teeth. At that moment he was flushed with enough rage to go inside the bar and kill Sloan with his fists—beat him where he sat on a barstool drinking himself stupid. Tom rubbed his left hand across his jaw and down his neck over his Adam’s apple. He stood up thinking. Then he leaned back inside the Scout cab and stuck the cigar box and whiskey back underneath the seat. He carried the cotton sack in his left hand, and shut the Scout door and got back into the truck with James Luke. He dropped the flashlight and sack on the seat. Right then he decided not to hang onto the little pistol, but to throw it out later for safety’s sake.

“You find it, man?” James Luke asked.

Tom held up the bag like a prize.

“You want to go get him?” James Luke had his hand on the column shift.

“Yeah, I do but not yet. Let’s get out of here before I change my mind and kill him,” Tom said, his anger welling. But then he took the pocket watch from the sack. He rubbed the gold cover with his thumb, wondering why Sloan would rape his wife, take the watch, and now sit on a barstool thinking he had gotten away with all of it.

James Luke pulled the transmission out of neutral and put it into reverse. His left foot held down the clutch. “We ought to go confront his sorry ass now,” James Luke said. “You know full well he stole the watch out from your house when he tried to kill Sara. Just walk into that bar and shoot him down. Provoke him and end it.” He hit his hands on the steering wheel to emphasize the point.

They sat a while in the truck cab, talking, debating how to address it all.

“I think I need a drink. I’m a little dry,” James Luke said.

“Me, too. Let’s go see if he’s in there,” Tom said. He was a teetotaler, never drinking a drop, and he didn’t even know where the words came from.

James Luke smiled. “Good. Now you’re talking.” He turned off the Chevy engine.

Tom knew he’d spoken out of moral weakness. They soured the taste in his mouth as he walked toward the barroom doors. He yielded to anger and hate. When James Luke opened the sagging door, the stench of stale beer, smoke, and rank urine knocked Tom in the face. The bar was not much brighter than the parking lot, as opaque as a snake hole at midnight.

There were a half-dozen people sitting at the bar, another two played at the pool table. A patron stood at the jukebox pushing in nickels. A tune by Wynn Stewart, “Another Day, Another Dollar,” careened off the walls.

Sloan Parnell sat at the far end of the plywood bar talking to a woman, the only woman in the room. She wore an amber blouse barely covering the tops of her breasts.

James Luke motioned to Tom, and they took a table against a wall away from the dull glow that issued from naked light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

The barkeep came over to the table where they sat. He was a one-eyed man named Huey Jenner from Traylor Branch. “What y’all drinking?” he asked.

“Beer. Two bottles of Jax,” James Luke said.

The barkeep smiled. “Y’all come way out here to meet up with somebody?”

“Sort of,” James Luke said. “You might say that.” He lit a cigarette.

“Beer’ll be right over,” Jenner said.

“Thanks,” Tom said.

For an hour they drank beer, speaking hardly a word between them. Tom hadn’t drunk a swallow of alcohol since he was a teenager, and the beer created a light buzz in his head. They watched the bar where Sloan placed his hands all over the woman until she finally slapped him in the face. Huey Jenner told Sloan to go back home, that he was a sloppy drunk, and that he had long worn out his welcome. All three of them passed curses and insults: Sloan, the woman, and the one-eyed barkeep. The woman moved to a stool at the other end of the bar and sat down beside a different man. Sloan threatened the barkeep, said he’d climb over the bar and knock him in the head unless he learned to respect his betters.

The barkeep reached beneath the bar and pulled out a crudely fashioned stick made from a cypress knee as big around as a baseball bat at the grip and as thick as a stovepipe on the end. “I’ll beat you to death with this lion tamer if you as much as sneeze in my direction,” he said. Then he braced himself with it as if to hit Sloan like a batter on a baseball diamond. But Sloan laughed in his face. Then he turned and looked directly at James Luke for a moment, scowling. James Luke stared back long enough to put Tom on edge, despite the beers he’d consumed.

Sloan staggered toward the woman at the other end of the bar. The jukebox wailed the Hank Williams song, “Settin’ the Woods on Fire.”

About this time, a tall redheaded man came from near the jukebox and grabbed Sloan by the back of the collar. The big man had muscles like hills on his shoulders, mounds of flesh on his arms, and he seemed to squeeze the life out of Sloan with his meaty hands.

“Don’t hurt him,” the one-eyed barkeep called out, “he’s the judge’s grandbaby. He’s just a big-mouthed sissy. He don’t mean nothing by it. I can handle him all right.”

But the big man continued to drag Sloan by the collar. Sloan hollered every step.

“What the hell is going on?” Tom asked.

“That’s Red Tadlock, and he’s going outside to give somebody a migraine. Let me go pay the tab and you follow Sloan,” James Luke said.

The patrons were scrambling, folks moving in different directions, most heading toward the door.

Tom followed them out to the parking lot.

Men were swinging and staggering, fighting and hollering, beer bottles flying like falling stars. It was a fracas, and Tom did well to avoid being hit by a fist, a boot, or a bottle.

“I’ve damn near had enough of you,” the big man yelled at Sloan as he threw his whole body into the Scout cab and shut the door, telling him not to ever come back to the barroom.

Then the big man turned back to the melee and began knocking out teeth, busting heads, blows that sounded like timber cracking.

Sloan cranked the engine, revving it to a loud scream. He shouted obscenities from the open window.

James Luke joined Tom in the parking lot after he handed the barkeep three dollar bills.

“Parnell’s leaving,” Tom said.

A pair of fighting men fell into Tadlock who began to beat both of them like schoolboys. At the same time, the Scout tires threw rocks and oyster shells across the parking lot, the tires squealing when they touched the blacktop road. James Luke and Tom made it to the pickup and followed Sloan into the roadway.

Tom reached for the cotton sack that was on the seat and took out Sloan’s derringer. The pistol was about the size of his palm. After they were on the blacktop nearly a mile, Tom rolled down the truck window and threw the pistol into the roadside with enough force to send it across a fence and into a thicket.

“What the hell did you do that for?” James Luke asked.

“Piss on him and his little gun,” Tom said, staring toward the red taillights of Sloan’s International Scout up ahead of them.

“Man, you should have kept it as a souvenir or sold it for a few bucks.”

“I don’t need anything he has.”

James Luke picked up the .45 automatic from the seat between them and then put it back down absently. “I guess he’s headed to his old man’s camp on the river,” he said.

“I bet that’s where he’s going,” Tom answered.

They trailed the Scout on Lizard Bayou Road. Sloan was flying high, barely making the curves, and James Luke gunned it behind him at sixty miles an hour, looking for the taillights to come into view during straight-aways. The blacktop turned to loose gravel after a while, but Sloan and his Scout kept pushing, speeding away, the distance between the Scout and James Luke’s 1958 Chevrolet truck widening. They lost the taillights altogether in a sharp curve and were traveling into the lowlands near Lake Tickfaw.

The roadway came to a “T” some distance ahead at Joe Bageant Road. The night was dark and starless, a black finality in the air as sure as hell itself. As they approached the “T,” a faded stop sign came into view. James Luke said, “Parnell’s place is to the left.”

Tom could not remember if the camp was to the east or to the west. But he said, “Then turn left.”

James Luke came to a rolling stop to make the hard left turn.

Tom could see a flickering of red light straight ahead, out across the gravel road and into a palmetto-dotted cow pasture. “Hold on. I believe something’s out yonder,” Tom said, pointing. He could see a broken fence in the high beams of the truck. A creosote post was freshly sheared a couple of feet above the ground, the barbed wire missing. It was obvious.

“The sorry bastard’s run off the road and into the field,” James Luke said.

“Either him or somebody else, but odds are it’s got to be him as fast as he was driving,” Tom said.

James Luke pulled the truck over to the side of the road near the breached fence and stopped. He took his pistol from the seat and held it in his right hand. Tom carried the flashlight. The two men walked quickly down the wood line and into the field.

The Scout motor was no longer running, but the lights were still on. The front end of the vehicle had hit an oak tree twice as big around as a man’s waist. The cab was crushed on the passenger side, and it was evident by the damage that the Scout had rolled over prior to stopping at the tree.

Tom aimed the flashlight into the cab. The window was rolled down, the door shut, but there was no driver. Sloan was missing.

“You think he ran off?” Tom asked.

James Luke peered into the empty cab. “No, I don’t think so. I bet he got slung out.”

Tom thought about his father’s watch, and the clear truth of finding it in the truck. Now Sloan’s blood guilt was irrefutable. Anger filled Tom’s chest. He wanted to bring justice to the man who’d done such harm to his wife and family.

They called out to Sloan and began searching along the path that his truck had taken before it crashed under one of the hardwood trees that dotted the pasture. This was not a good pasture, just a thick area, partly forested, rangeland for scrub cattle, not Fitz-Blackwell property, but private land owned by some dirt farmer by the looks of it. As they walked, wild-eyed cows ran along in front of the wrecked Scout, staring into the headlights.

“I see him,” Tom hollered.

James Luke was ten paces behind.

Sloan lay face down over the top of a bramble of briars and vines, his head lower than his torso, his face submerged in a snaky pile of saw briars, blackberry, and fallen limbs.

The two men stood gazing down a moment. Tom’s flashlight traced the body. At a distant house a pen full of hounds barked.