I drove fast, faster than I should have because the roads were slick with rain. The windshield wipers made their tick-tack sound, and it seemed a reminder of time running out. Carolina Power had said it would take ten more months for the lake to fill up, but in my mind it was like I was racing water rising by the second.
‘It ain’t already underwater, is it?’ I asked. ‘That’s not likely,’ he said. ‘It’s high ground.’
‘We can’t do this,’ Momma said. ‘It’s too late, years too late,’ but it was like she was talking to herself.
It wasn’t like a dream anymore. What I felt was just the opposite, like everything in my life had been a long, deep dream till I opened my hand and showed Momma the Gold Star. It was like I had just been born and was seeing the world for the first time. What I was seeing and hearing could have made me cry like a newborn baby. But it didn’t. There was a coldness in my heart that kept any tears froze deep inside me. We listened to the windshield wipers as we headed up into the mountains, the sky above us gray and low.
I turned off the blacktop and onto the dirt road. The road curved and dropped. I braked and jerked the steering wheel to keep us on the road.
‘Slow down, son,’ he said.
But I wasn’t going to slow down. I bumped and swerved on down the road, not much caring if I ran off or not.
Then I came out of a curve and saw the roadblock laid in the middle of the road like a giant sawhorse, the silver patrol car parked on the left edge of the road. Sheriff Alexander looked right at me through the windshield as I swerved to the right side. I ran two wheels into the ditch and clipped the roadblock. I swerved back onto the road and kept going, past Travis Alexander’s farm, then Mrs. Winchester’s before turning, leaving the road where the mailbox said Holcombe.
I didn’t go all the way up the drive. I scraped and bucked over the ditch and into the cabbage field I hadn’t harvested. I didn’t stop until I came to water.
I got out and took a shovel from the truck bed.
‘We’ll need this too,’ he said, and handed me a cabbage sack.
That’s when I realized what should have been clear from the start. What we were going to find wasn’t going to be in a coffin. Murderers didn’t put their victims in coffins.
Sheriff Alexander’s car came up the drive. He slowed for a second in front of the house, then bumped down the field edge and parked twenty yards from the truck. He didn’t try to drive through the field. Unlike me he was worried about getting out of there.
‘What in the hell are you all doing?’ Sheriff Alexander said as he limped toward us.
‘What should have been done a long time ago, Sheriff,’ he said. ‘What can’t be hid no longer.’
‘And what’s that, Billy?’ Sheriff Alexander asked.
‘Holland Winchester. The man I killed.’
Sheriff Alexander stopped like he’d been hit by a two by four. He stood there not ten yards from us. It seemed he couldn’t take another step. His weight made his shoes sink deeper in the mud, almost like he was taking root in the ground.
‘You can handcuff me if you want,’ he said, holding his hands out to Sheriff Alexander. ‘But I ain’t going to run. I never figured to do that, even in the worst of it.’
Sheriff Alexander didn’t move and neither did any of the rest of us. We just stood there with the rain dripping off us like statues on a courthouse lawn.
‘It’s too late, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander finally said. His voice was gentle, a gentleness you wouldn’t think such a big man would have in him, especially after all the meanness he’d seen as a law man.
He stepped toward us, his shoes squishing as he pulled them out of the mud.
‘Let’s get out of here, Billy. Whatever’s been done has been done. We’re too old to change it now. Let the water cover it up.’
‘I got to do it, Sheriff,’ he said and lifted the other shovel from the truck bed.
‘What about you?’ Sheriff Alexander said to Momma.
‘Surely you’ve got enough sense to know I’m right.’
Momma looked at Sheriff Alexander and then she looked at us. It was like she wasn’t sure whose side she was on.
‘It’s got to be done,’ she finally said.
Sheriff Alexander shook his head like he was put out with all three of us. He took his glasses off and wiped the rain from the lenses. He was thinking about what he was going to say, what he was going to do. His gray eyes looked beyond tired, like they’d seen more than they could bear the last few days and their grayness was nothing but smoke left over from something snuffed out. You could tell he hadn’t slept much last night. I wondered if it was what had happened with Mrs. Winchester or what had happened with his brother that had kept him awake and drained the light from his eyes.
‘Where is he?’ Sheriff Alexander asked as he put his glasses back on.
‘Across the river,’ I said.
Sheriff Alexander looked at the water that covered the lower part of the field. His eyes followed it across the river bed and to the foot of Licklog.
‘This isn’t going to be easy. That river’s deeper now.’
‘You don’t have to go,’ I said.
It was raining steady now, and the clouds promised it would only get harder. I stepped into the water.
‘I’m going, son,’ Sheriff Alexander said, his voice angry. ‘But I’m getting a rope out of my trunk first. I don’t want someone to drown doing this, so you just wait a damn minute.’
Sheriff Alexander walked over to the patrol car and got a rope, but not before talking on his radio.
‘You lead,’ he said, handing me a rope end.
I picked up the shovel and cabbage sack with my free hand. I stepped into the water, the rope straightening out behind me.
‘You next, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
‘I’m going too,’ Momma said, reaching out for the rope as well.
No one argued with her—Sheriff Alexander grabbed the other rope end and wrapped it around his hand like I’d done.
‘I’ll carry that shovel, Billy,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘You just worry with holding on to that rope.’
The water barely covered my boots at first. I was still in the field, or what until a few days ago had been a field. It was like slogging through a black-water swamp, for the mud hid the limbs and trees the loggers had left. I stumbled twice before I’d even got out of the field. I could feel the others behind me, the rope tightening and tugging each time they stumbled or paused. I glanced back and it was a sorry-looking sight. The rain had drenched their clothes, and they hung onto the rope like shipwreck survivors. They’ll never make it, I thought. I’ll end up crossing this river alone.
Beyond the field the going got easier despite the current. The river ran dingy from the rain, but unlike in the fields you could make out the bottom. I found the shallows below a blue hole and started across. I took my time, looking for patches of white sand between the trees and limbs and rocks. The water rose to my kneecaps but no higher.
I didn’t know I was across until I bumped against the bank. I half-stepped and half-crawled to where the water got swampy and still again, but not before I’d slipped and slid back down the bank a couple of times. It was a hard thing to do without dropping the shovel or cabbage sack.
I pulled the others up the bank.
‘That river’s rising,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘This needs to be done fast.’
Sheriff Alexander handed the shovel to him.
‘This way,’ he said, not waiting for Sheriff Alexander to finish looping the rope. He led us through the shallow water, using the shovel like a cane to keep his balance when he stumbled.
We started up Licklog. The rain came harder now, a cold rain, the kind that soaked to your bones. We were all shivering and miserable, not a stitch of dry clothing among us. The clouds looked low enough to touch.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s right around here.’
He stepped around the stumps, trying to find the one that belonged to the ash tree. Then he stopped.
‘This is it,’ he said, standing in a clear spot. He held out the shovel and moved it over the ground like a dowsing stick.
‘Somewhere right in here,’ he said.
He dug on one side and I started on the other. The rain had made the ground soft so it was easy going, easy enough to where my thoughts could go where they wanted. That wasn’t such a good thing. My mind was tangled as a blackberry patch and it seemed to be getting more tangled by the minute. An hour ago I’d wanted to believe there was only one way I could feel about the man beside me but that had just been wishful thinking on my part. We’d shared too much.
Even now we worked together, side by side, the same way we’d done my whole life. My deepest memory—deeper than Mrs Winchester’s eyes on me at church, deeper than Momma rocking me when an earache wouldn’t let me sleep—was being with him in the fields, a jar of pretty-colored potato bugs in my hand. Helping him, or at least that’s what he told me those days I followed him through the fields.
Think of something bad he did to you, I told myself. But there wasn’t anything. He’d never raised his hand against me or cussed me. He’d punished me when l’d deserved it but ever always in a gentle way. My not being his son hadn’t stopped him from loving me like a son.
The rain suddenly came harder, like a big knife had slit the sky open. I couldn’t see but a few feet in any direction. It was like a white curtain had fell around us, shutting off the rest of the world. If he’s not your father, who is he then? I thought.
‘Hurry,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
You could tell he fretted more and more about getting back across the river. I stepped out of the empty hole I’d made and started again, closer to the ash tree this time. I dug a good three feet before my shovel brought up something that wasn’t a root or rock. I kneeled down and rubbed the dirt off, dirt a different shade than what I’d dug before.
It was a chain, two pieces of rusty metal dangling from it. I closed my hand around the pieces. I didn’t do it hard but they crumbled like butterfly wings. I dug faster now. I found a medal with the silk still attached, a couple of boot eyelets and some bone chips. I put all of it in the sack with some of the dirt.
I kept digging but all I found was a few shards of Indian pottery and more roots.
‘That’s all there is, son,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
I didn’t want to believe that. I didn’t know what I thought I was going to find but it was ever so much more than what laid at the bottom of the cabbage sack.
‘Let’s go,’ Sheriff Alexander said, his hand settling firm on my shoulder, because I still kneeled on the ground, sifting through the mud for something I might have missed. But I knew I was searching for something I wasn’t going to find.
I stood up and looked at the people who’d raised me. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to feel? I wanted to ask.
We sloshed back through the woods, my mind still tangled as memories grabbed hold of me like briars. I remembered him sitting on the bed, waiting for me to fall back asleep after a nightmare.
‘You get that from me,’ he’d said. ‘I had bad dreams when I was a kid, too.’ He’d patted me on the shoulder. ‘Don’t fret, son. You’ll soon outgrow it same as I did.’
Then another memory tore into me, a night years later at the county fair when I’d raised a pellet gun and hit the bull’s eye. ‘You’re a good aim, just like your daddy,’ Momma had said. His eyes had met hers and Momma’s face had lost its smile and the teddy bear I gave her couldn’t bring that smile back.
And the memory that tore deepest of all, because it was one that asked a question I had to answer.
‘You’re a Winchester, aren’t you?’ Mr. Pipkin had asked.
When we got to the bank the water was higher but that wasn’t the worst of it. The river was muddy now. There’d be no way to tell where we stepped.
Sheriff Alexander unraveled his rope.
‘You best leave those shovels,’ he told us. His teeth chattered as he spoke. ‘You’re going to have enough trouble getting yourself across.’ He nodded at the sack in my hand. ‘You could leave that too. You could save us all a lot of trouble if you did. My deputy’s on his way up here. Once he sees what’s in that sack this is a murder case.’
l looked at Momma and the man who’d raised me. Beg me to do what he says, I thought. Make this somehow easier. But they didn’t say a word.
I knew at that moment I had to make a choice between the man who’d raised me or the sack of bones and dirt in my hand, and that choice had to be made on this side of the river. It wasn’t near that simple, of course. It wasn’t a matter of what was the right or the wrong thing to do or what I owed the men who claimed me as a son or to Momma or Mrs. Winchester. The only thing that mattered was what I could live with.
I stepped into the river and didn’t stop until the water got to my knees. I turned, my eyes on Momma and Daddy. The current pushed hard against my legs but I stood firm. I grabbled the Gold Star from my pocket and dropped it in the sack. I raised the sack in my right hand and held it between us for a moment before I let it slip through my fingers. The current toted the sack a few feet downstream before it sunk.
‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ Sheriff Alexander said.
Nobody else spoke or moved. For a few seconds the only sound was the rain.
Then Sheriff Alexander threw me the rope end and I started across water that seemed a lot colder than a half hour ago. I waded blind now, moving my feet slow and careful across a bottom I couldn’t see. The current ran stronger, pushing me below where we’d crossed earlier. I wasn’t halfway and the water almost reached my waist.
I didn’t know whether to go back or go on. I just stood there, my brain working like it was in slow motion. I looked back at the others, spread out across the water with the rope in their hands like we were working a seine.
‘Go on,’ Sheriff Alexander shouted from the shallows and I did, because I no longer seemed able to think clearly for myself.
I unraveled the rope from my hand. If I slipped I didn’t want to carry them with me. I took a few more steps and the water started to get shallow again.
Suddenly the rope tightened.
‘I’m caught,’ Daddy shouted. ‘My leg’s in some timber.’