Love and Lament (46 page)

She was pleased that the courthouse here was not quite as impressive as Haw County’s. It had an ornate cupola, and the pediments and pillars were fine too, but the whole thing looked like a miniature of what she was used to. Perhaps because the green around this one was bigger. She straightened her shoulders, put on her most businesslike look, and strode up the walkway.

Inside, she was directed down the hall to the sheriff’s office. The doors here were heavy and substantial with titles printed in bold block letters. Back home, there were no titles. They had more state money here, with the hospital and the school for the deaf. She hesitated, took a breath, and knocked on the door.

Nobody answered, so she went in. A mousy woman wearing thick glasses, her hair pulled back to her scalp line and caught in a tight bun, sat hunched over a magnifying glass reading a typed document. She reminded Mary Bet of what she herself had been like, would end up being again after her term expired. The woman’s desk was neatly arranged, papers stacked in a wire basket, rubber stamps lined up just so. On the wall behind, above a black iron safe, hung framed portraits of Woodrow Wilson and the new governor, while another wall was occupied by a bookshelf and a telephone, its brass bells
staring out like breasts. Mary Bet almost laughed, imagining what this woman would’ve made of the office back home—the old governor staring down from the wall, papers and books littering desks and floors, last year’s calendar getting mixed up with this year’s.

She rapped her knuckles on the door, and finally the woman looked up. Mary Bet drew herself erect, letting the woman take her in—the tilted hat and half-veil, the long sable coat, the purple scarf fastened in front with a silver brooch. She introduced herself and asked if the county sheriff was in.

The woman repeated what she’d just heard, then, the words sinking in, a light came to her eyes and she said. “Oh, you’re the one from over in Haw they put in while your sheriff was away.”

Mary Bet eyed the woman, judging her to be a good ten years older than she, and said, “I am. I’m sheriff until there’s an election, and if I run and win I’ll still be sheriff.”

Now the woman pulled back, and a little smile of admiration broke out around the corners of her pinched mouth. “Wouldn’t that be something?” she said.

The woman suddenly remembered her place and said to Mary Bet, “I’ll go tell Mr. Upchurch you’re here.” Then, sotto voce, “He’s not busy today.”

Mary Bet took a seat in a wooden armchair and waited for her counterpart, trying to think of him as a counterpart instead of a man with a badge. What was she, really, but a deputy, a clerk authorized by the county to fill in until a real sheriff could be put in office? But she had solemnly sworn to support, maintain, and defend the Constitution of the United States and to execute the office of sheriff to the best of her knowledge and ability, so help her God. Away from home, she was a young woman—at best, a lady with a sterling reputation—but she expected to be treated like any visiting dignitary. Just let Mr. Upchurch try to shift her around here—she’d handle him, so help her God.

She felt as if she were embarking on a journey that she had meant to take long ago, and that she had caught the last train leaving the station. Whatever she uncovered, she felt that she must know, or be forever stuck in some waiting room, while life went on all around her and the bitter taste grew stronger. If she found nothing, she would return home satisfied. As soon as she had this thought, she knew that she was only fooling herself. What she’d already found had brought her this far. The note: “I have make a terrible mistake,” the ambiguity of “have make” tearing at her, standing halfway between the past and the present as though challenging her to believe he’d intended to say exactly that.

The clock on the wall ticked and the quarter hour chimed, and still Mr. Upchurch kept her waiting. The mousy woman came back and said that the sheriff would be out in a few minutes and asked her if she’d like some coffee. Mary Bet shook her head, her lips pressed together. She didn’t much care for coffee or any stimulating drink. She didn’t see the point in being stimulated beyond what you already were—if you were tired you should go take a rest. Alcohol—that was a different thing. It could make people say things they ordinarily wouldn’t. She folded her gloved hands in her lap and waited.

Presently, the secretary stood and said that Sheriff Upchurch would be happy to see Mary Bet now. She stood and followed the woman to an inner office, where a large man with a large empty holster stood studying some papers in the light of a sash window that gave onto a shrub-enclosed courtyard. The sheriff, standing before a massive rolltop desk, looked up from his papers and said, “Ah, Miss Hartsoe, it’s a pleasure. I’ve heard so much about you.” He had a wen the size of a grape on one side of his forehead, and a thick brown mustache that looked as neatly combed as his hair. He bowed his head and indicated an armchair for Mary Bet to sit in. “Looks like we might get some of that rain we’ve been needing,”
he said, taking a seat and glancing out the window. “How’ve y’all fared over there?”

“Tolerable,” she said. She decided to get right into her business here. “Mr. Upchurch, I had a brother who was killed on the train tracks outside of town here sixteen years ago. He was brought to the sheriff’s office, where your predecessor got a coroner to declare him dead. I wondered if you could show me the paperwork on that case?”

Mr. Upchurch had been listening with an open mouth, which he now closed. “Well,” he said, trying to collect himself. He leaned back in his chair and sighed, his big belly rising and falling. “Well, I don’t know anything about that. Sixteen years ago, you say?”

“Yes,” Mary Bet said.

“Sheriff Meacham would’ve filed that report, and he’s been at the state hospital for a long time, so he wouldn’t recollect anything about it.”

Mary Bet started to tell him that her own father was at the same hospital, but it was never something she told strangers, never talked about with anyone, unless they asked, and she didn’t see how it could help her here. She decided to play poker with Upchurch, let him go on and explain where the paperwork was.

He rubbed his chin and regarded her a moment, and she merely smiled. “What were you looking for, exactly?”

“I want to see what it says about cause of death and time of death. It bothers me that I’ve never seen that report.” She realized the only way she’d get anything here was to relieve his suspicions and lay everything out for him to see. “It bothers me that I’ve never understood what caused him to be walking along those tracks like that and then not even feel the train a-coming.”

Mr. Upchurch nodded now, his second chin pouching. He stood and went to a wooden filing cabinet in a corner of the room. He opened and closed two drawers, then at the third he pulled out a
large manila file folder and began thumbing through the contents. “Dr. Bone may have his own reports. I don’t know how long he keeps them. But they’re probably less detailed than what we have here. Here we go, we’re onto the right year now. Deaths. What was the month?”

“November.”

“All right. Demsey, Given, Hartsoe. Siler. Here ‘tis.”

At his name, Mary Bet’s heart flipped. Here he was, filed away for sixteen years, and might’ve disappeared from the record altogether if Burke County had not been so careful. The thin pages were bradded together into an inch-thick sheaf, and Upchurch was folding them over for easy viewing, reading as he did so, when he paused. “You’re not going to do anything with this, are you?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know. You’re not going to bring a case against us, are you? Heh, heh,” he laughed.

“I don’t reckon I’d have any cause to.” She reached over and took the sheaf from him and read the report like she was drinking water after a long hot day. The report was typed, with signatures by Sheriff John Meacham and Dr. J. Trimble Bone. Her brother’s name appeared at the top of the report. She gulped in the text and its significance: “Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad … Turkey Run crossing approx. 1 mile southeast of town … Siler Hartsoe, 20-year-old student at the North Carolina School for the Deaf …” And then the words that swam up from the page and into her brain: “Accidental Death, poss. Suicide.”

“What does this mean?” she asked, showing Mr. Upchurch the line.

He shook his head. “It means there was no way to determine what happened.”

“But why would they list suicide if they had no reason to suspect it?”

Again Mr. Upchurch shook his head, glancing at Mary Bet and then down to his desk. “I don’t know, Miss Hartsoe. Honestly, I wasn’t there. I can tell you that since I’ve been sheriff, lots of people have committed suicide in Burke County—something around seventeen—and three of them were on the railroad tracks.”

“Were any of them deaf?”

“Not that I remember.”

“I just don’t see why they’d write possible suicide, not having anything to go on.”

“Could’ve been a lot of explanations. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t remember that case. I was thirty-one years old then and living with my daddy on his farm up near Turnip. But they used to have deaf people getting hit on the tracks regular, until they macadamized the road out to the fairgrounds.”

“But the fairgrounds is north of town, isn’t it?” Mary Bet asked.

“Yes, they used to walk the tracks partway up there and then cut through on a trail. They’d go up there to the carnivals, and there’s a place where folks like to picnic.”

“But would they ever have gone east?”

“There was a roadhouse down there until it burned long about five or six years ago. Maybe he was going down there. You must’ve come across cases like this where it’s not clear what happened. How do you fill in reports like that?”

“We don’t speculate on what might’ve happened,” she replied, “unless there’s a good reason for it.”

“Well, I don’t either,” he said, pulling his shoulders back. “But I can’t tell you about Sheriff Meacham. They say in his last year—a year before this event here—” he tapped the report, “he was very forgetful.”

Near the bottom of the report, the words “killed instantly” had been scratched out and “deceased on site” penned in above. “Why does it say this?” Mary Bet asked.

“Probably he was still alive when the conductor got to him.” The sheriff hesitated, tucked a thumb into the pocket of his open vest, then said, “Maybe even after the doctor got there.”

“I thought he was the coroner.”

“He’s both. I expect in this case, he died shortly before or after the coroner arrived, and that’s why they didn’t take him straight off to the hospital, you see. That’s not uncommon. And you needn’t worry about the suffering—he was probably completely unconscious.”

Mary Bet was not reassured, but she would not let herself picture her brother in agony, trying to live. Instead she thought of her father—all along he knew what was in this report and had never told her. It still didn’t make complete sense. “I can’t understand it,” she said. “Why would somebody go walking on the tracks like that and not get off?”

“Could be he was distracted about something, or he didn’t care one way or the other what happened to him. But I know if a person doesn’t want to live, he’ll find a way to die. There was a fellow here a while back that tried to cut off his own head with an ax, and when that failed he threw himself off the railroad bridge at low water. Took him a week to die. Should’ve been at the insane asylum. Many’s tried up yonder, but they keep them from it, mostly. I’m telling you this because you seem to be in need of something, but I’m afraid I can’t give any more than stories.”

Mary Bet started to ask him what could’ve distracted her brother, but of course he wouldn’t know. “I have to make a visit to the state hospital,” she told him.

“I don’t expect you’ll find much out there. Old Meacham’s not even likely to know he was sheriff. I wouldn’t bother if I was you.”

“I’m not going to see the sheriff,” she said.

CHAPTER 29

1918

S
HE BID THE
sheriff farewell and got back in her hired car to go over to the hospital. It was hard to believe that only this morning she was waving out the window to Flora and the others who had come to see her off. During the whole trip she tried to picture her father, but she was afraid of what he might look and sound like this time, and afraid she might not even recognize him, nor he her.