The Bottoms (41 page)

When we arrived that night, Daddy was off in the woods looking for us, and Grandma was in bed, ill from excitement. Toby, who I thought had died, was in the house, lying on a makeshift pallet Mama had made for him. She had also bandaged his head. She called him a hero. When he saw us, his poor pathetic body managed to make his tail work, and he beat it a few times to let us know he was glad to see us.

Near dawn, wet and tired, Daddy arrived, found us sitting at the table telling Mama and Grandma all about it. When he saw us, and we came to him, he dropped to his knees, took us both in his arms and began to cry.

Next morning they found Cecil on a sandbar. He was bloated up and swollen from water and snake bites. His neck was broken, Daddy said. Telly had taken care of him before the snake bites.

Caught up in some roots next to the bank, his arms spread and through them, his feet wound up in vines, was Telly. The cane knife wound had torn open his chest and side. Daddy said that sad old straw hat was still on his head; it had somehow gotten twisted up in his hair, and that the part that looked like horns had washed down and was covering his eyes.

I wondered what had gotten into Telly, the Goat Man. He had led me out there to save Tom, but he hadn’t wanted any part of stopping Cecil. Maybe he was afraid. But when we were on the bridge, and Cecil was getting the best of us, he had come for him.

Had it been because he wanted to help us, or was he just there already and frightened? I’ll never know. I thought of poor Telly living out there in the woods all that time, only his Daddy knowing he was there, and keeping it secret just so folks would leave him alone, not take advantage of him because he was addle-headed.

In the end, I remember mostly just lying in bed in what had become Grandma’s room, our old room, for two days after, nursing all the wounds in my foot from stickers and such, thinking about what had almost happened to Tom, trying to get my strength back.

Mama stayed by our side for the next two days, leaving us only long enough to make soup. Daddy sat up with us at night. When I awoke, frightened, thinking I was still on the Swinging Bridge, he would be there, and he would smile and put out his hand and touch my head, and I would lie back and sleep again.

During the day he took a side of the barn down and used the planks to close in the sleeping porch. He said he’d never feel safe with anyone sleeping out there again. I missed the old porch, but it was best he did what he did. I could have never lain out there again, closed my eyes for a good night’s sleep.

It was nearly two years later before he replaced the boards he had taken from the barn.

Over a period of years, picking up a word here and there, we would learn that there had been more murders like those in our area, all the way down from Arkansas and over into Oklahoma and some of North Texas. Back then no one pinned those on one murderer. The law just didn’t think like that in them days. The true nature of serial killers was unknown.

It’s all done now, those long-ago events of the nineteen thirties.

A
little side note. About six months after the conclusion of these events, a hunter, a man my Daddy knew named Jimmy St. John, discovered a strange thing. Interestingly enough, it was near where Red’s car had been abandoned, but the only way you could have found what he found was if you dropped your flashlight while out coon hunting, climbed down the riverbank where it had been dropped, and discovered there was a gap in a clutch of trees, and if you looked up just right, you could see it.

It was what looked like a tar baby; a scarecrow thickened with tar hanging from a rope fastened to a limb over the river.

Next day he told Daddy about it, and Daddy drove over there. I didn’t get all the facts then, but over the years they were pieced together.

A body covered thick in pitch, the eyes open, but gone, of course, just sockets filled with insects, had a rope embedded in its tar-covered neck, and the other end was fastened around a limb. Daddy said he could see that the man had thrown the rope over the limb, fastened it around his neck, and leaped off the
riverbank. He said he wondered what it was like for someone to decide such a thing, to do it in that manner.

I think Daddy, during his darkest hours, might have considered death himself, but doing it like that, so lonely and so strange …

There were two huge barrels of tar there, and they were on what had once been a fire, but was now nothing more than washed gray ash. The cans were blackened and the lids were off, and there was a flat board covered with the stuff.

Daddy determined that the man had heated the tar, and then, deliberately, plastered the scalding hot stuff to himself, put the rope around his neck, and swung out over the river.

Having come to trust him, Daddy took the body to Doc Tinn, who did his best to clean it up. A large part of the flesh had been preserved by the tar, so that when it was taken off with paint remover and such, it was easy to see that one arm was self-tattooed with a list of women’s names. I never asked Daddy if Mama’s name was actually listed there, but I had my suspicions.

Across the chest was a new crude tattoo that read, NIGGER.

Daddy put it together this way. Red loved Miss Maggie like a mother, but when he discovered she was his mother, he lost his bearings, his position in life. He was no longer a good white man looking after a poor colored woman, he was colored himself. He then tried to save Mose, his father, and when he couldn’t, and when he decided his life had been duped, he went to Miss Maggie. Maybe he thought she would say it was all a joke, or something of that nature. It’s impossible to know. Or maybe Red decided to get rid of the one person who he knew knew for sure he wasn’t white.

Again, we’ll never know. But the guilt of who he was, and what he had done, caused him to torture himself with a crude tattoo cut into his chest, hot tar, and a slow choking death.

Maybe the Klan done it. Having discovered Red was black and that he had an arm tattooed with the names of near a dozen white women. Or maybe it was because they knew Red had tried to save Mose.

No way to know for sure. Life’s like that. It isn’t like one of Grandma’s murder mysteries. Everything doesn’t get sewn up neatly.

Like that damn picture colored with pencil in Mose’s old shack.

What was that about?

Could Mose have done that?

Since he didn’t have a picture of his boy, had he made one to go with his long-lost wife? Just colored in one to remind him he had a son?

Or had Cecil put it there?

He liked to put those little rolled-up pieces of newspaper in the bodies, hang up those pictures out of the Sears and Roebuck, for whatever reason. He had left them with his victims. Did he in some way consider Mose a victim of his; a man punished for his crime? He hadn’t had a chance to put the paper on the body, so had he placed it in the cabin?

And what was on those other pieces of paper? Pictures of women? Did he blame those pictures for what they made him do? Lust and murder?

For a time, here in the home, before he stroked out, there was a retired psychiatrist, and I told him my story of that time, and asked him about those pieces of paper. He had no set answer, but thought they might even have been clippings about women from the papers. Maybe crimes that had to do with women.

He said it could be a lot of things, but none of those things were really an answer.

I didn’t know then what it was about. And I don’t have any better idea now.

There’s not much left to tell. Just some general business. I was a hero for a while, then things settled down and we went to doing what everyone else was doing.

They finally got a schoolteacher, and before long they had several and we were attending regular. I made it all the way to the tenth grade. Tom finished the whole thing up, and even went on to college some years later.

But after that night in the bottoms, Grandma never fully recovered. It was like the anxiety took it out of her, made her old and wrecked her heart. She saw Mr. Groon a bit, but that didn’t take. She got sick, stayed in bed for a year or so, then one morning she just didn’t wake up.

We were living then in a new house on five acres Daddy bought in town. There was already a small cemetery back there, a family plot for some family long gone and forgotten, though those who had owned the house and the land had kept it up out of respect. We did the same. Grandma was buried back there under a huge oak tree that still grows, or did when I was there some ten years ago, back when I could get around. The grave has broken down and blended with the land. That’s exactly what Grandma wanted, to be consumed by and dumped all over East Texas by earthworms.

Toby’s buried somewhere out there as well.

After the events I’ve told you about, Toby lived another five years. He had run of the new place, inside and out. One morning Daddy let him out for his morning constitutional. He limped down the steps and out of sight. By nightfall he hadn’t returned. Next morning Mama found his body not far from where Grandma was buried.

As for our old place, well, Daddy sold it. He just couldn’t crop it anymore, and he wanted to be closer to the barbershop. Mose’s grave got lost among trees and brambles, and now there’s a parking lot and savings and loan built over it. It’s like he never existed.

Daddy quit being constable. He wasn’t no good at it anyway. He went to full-time hair cutting, and gradually times got better and he did well until the cancer. Fortunately, when it came, he went fast. He was sixty-two years old. Mama, as if Daddy were calling her, followed close behind.

Tom was killed by a drunk driver in nineteen sixty-nine. She grew into a woman lovely as our mother, made a kindergarten teacher. Her husband was a jackass. He ran off when she got pregnant, and was seldom heard of again.

Tom was driving my worthless nephew into Houston to see a doctor about shaking his drug habit when it happened. It was a head-on collision. Tom died instantly.

My nephew, named Jacob after my father, got a bruise on his head, recovered, and lived long enough to impregnate several women, poison the lives of numerous people with his drug and alcohol problems, and finally, almost mercifully, ended his life with a drug overdose in nineteen seventy-five.

Doc Tinn and his wife moved off to Houston sometime in the sixties. We really didn’t have much association with each other. I never saw or heard from them again.

Pappy Treesome’s boy Root was castrated and burned by the Klan in nineteen thirty-nine. When Pappy died and Camilla became an invalid from a stroke, Root was on his own more, and turned out he wasn’t so harmless. He committed a half dozen rapes on colored girls, for which not a thing was done, it being determined by white and black alike they had it comin’. I’m not sure why they had it comin’, other than they were female and he was male and he wanted to satisfy himself.

Finally Root made a bigger mistake in the eyes of white society than the rape of colored girls. I don’t know where it happened, or the circumstances around it, but he exposed himself to a white woman, and he was done in. Daddy once said he estimated Root had the mind of a five-year-old.

Old Man Nation lived a drunken life and made trouble
throughout it. It didn’t catch up with him, though. He lived until he was eighty or more and died in his sleep.

His wife, long run off, was never replaced, and the two boys … Well, I don’t exactly know what came of them. They moved off. I heard tell that one of them died in a fishing accident, but I don’t know that’s the truth, and if it is, I don’t know which one of them it was.

Doc Stephenson, I have no memory of him going. Just one day he wasn’t there, and Dr. Taylor was. When I was twenty-two I became marshal of Marvel Creek. Its first. Before that there had just been a constable for the area, but the place, though never big, had grown and felt it needed its own personal law.

When World War Two started up I enlisted, but they wouldn’t take me. Years earlier, Sally Redback, stung by a hornet one day while I was plowing her, had kicked back in terror, catching me on the side of the cheek, causing damage to my right eye. I recovered with only a small scar, but it affected my vision. It was presumed I wouldn’t be able to shoot a rifle. I tried to explain I could shoot left-handed, but at that point in time they weren’t scrambling for soldiers, so I ended up staying home.