One Foot in Eden (7 page)

Most of the men had gathered in Billy Holcombe’s yard by the time I got back. Stonewall hadn’t caught a scent. Tom Watson had brought nothing out of the river but a snapping turtle and a few more trout.

Billy soon called it a day as well. I watched him limp out of his field toward the house where his supper waited.
You don’t seem a man Luck
has found often in his life, Billy,
I thought.
Maybe now that you need
it most though, it has finally come. But even the dead can slip free like
Houdini from rocks and rope that hold them down. Currents can tug a
body out of the deepest undercut. You’ve read your Bible, Billy, I thought.
You know the dead can rise on the third day.

When the last man finally straggled in, I told Leonard and the others who’d walked the woods that I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. I told Tom and his men to be back at 9:00 in the morning.

‘That body’s got to be in the river,’ I told Bobby as we got in the car.

‘Well I don’t see how we missed it,’ Bobby said. ‘We poked every undercut and dynamited every blue hole a damn mile upstream and down. You think it to be farther away than that?’

‘No,’ I said as we bounced down Billy’s drive. ‘That body can’t be too far from that horse,’ and soon as I said that I realized what Billy Holcombe had done. I laughed out loud at the sheer smarts of it.

‘What’s tickled your funny bone?’ Bobby asked.

‘I’ll show you.’

I turned the car around and headed back up the drive.

‘Get a shovel and a rope from the trunk,’ I told Bobby as we got out.

Bobby did as I told him while I stepped up on the porch.

‘Come on,’ I told Billy when he came to the door. ‘And bring a lantern. We need to go back over to where your plow horse is.’

Billy was worried. I could tell that right away. Lucas Bridges, the county coroner, claimed a dying man or woman had a certain smell about them. I believed a scared man did too, and what I smelled coming off Billy Holcombe was more than sweat from field work.

‘Step ahead of us and be the bell-cow,’ I told Billy as we left the yard. ‘I’d rather see a snake before I put my foot down on him.’

Though rattlesnakes were bad to crawl on hot nights, I was more concerned with Billy trying to slip off in the dark. I wanted him out front where I could watch him.

‘What you got on your mind?’ Bobby asked.

‘Maybe just a snipe hunt, but I don’t think so,’ I said.

We made our way across the river, the same river De Soto had crossed. De Soto hadn’t found what he’d been looking for in Jocassee, but, as Michaux had discovered, things could be found in the valley of the lost. All you had to do was look with a careful eye. That and know where to look.

The moon wasn’t out, and it took me a moment to realize what that meant. Then a breeze rustled the trees. If the horse hadn’t been close by I’d have smelled the sharpness in the air that comes before rain. I wondered if Billy knew the rain was coming. If he did I wondered if he saw it as more good luck. Or did he believe it no longer mattered since I knew now what he’d done with Holland’s body?
Yes, Billy, the eyes can
lie, but eventually they’ll tell the truth. If I could see your eyes they would
tell me, Billy. But I’ll know soon enough,
I thought as we stepped onto the far bank. Soon enough.

‘We got to move that horse,’ I told Bobby. ‘Do you think if we put a rope around its neck we could drag it a few yards?’

‘We can try,’ Bobby said.

The buzzards had flown up in the trees to roost for the night, so all Bobby had to scare off was a possum. Bobby tied the rope on, doing his best not to breathe, for the horse was plenty rank after two days under a dog-day sun.

‘You help too,’ I told Billy. We dragged the horse until I said stop. The lantern made the ground shadowy, but there was enough light to see there was no body. I picked up the shovel and stepped closer. Two jabs and I knew that ground.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, ‘and leave the damn rope, Bobby. I don’t feel like smelling dead horse all the way to Seneca.’

For a few minutes I had been so certain. But I’d been dead wrong. Now it was as if I was back at the beginning, with nothing certain at all, not even if there had been a murder. Maybe he’s not even dead, I thought. Maybe Holland had gotten Amy Holcombe pregnant and taken off to Texas or California. Maybe Bobby was right and Holland was having a good laugh at our expense, that this was Holland’s way of getting back at me for what happened at The Borderline—have me come out here and make a fool of myself searching for someone who was alive half a country away.

But I couldn’t believe Holland was alive. Billy Holcombe had been expecting me when I stepped into his field. Mrs. Winchester’s grief was real. As we recrossed I could smell the coming rain. A real chunk washer, I hoped, enough to raise the dead.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I told Billy as he stepped up on his porch. ‘Who knows what might turn up, especially after a good rain.’ Billy said nothing to that. He just went on inside to finish his supper.

‘You mind driving?’ I asked Bobby.

‘Not at all,’ Bobby said, so I handed him the keys. I closed my eyes as we bumped down toward the river.

‘Radio bother you?’ Bobby asked.

‘No,’ I said.

Hank Williams’ voice rose out of the static, singing about his loneliness. He was a young man, still in his twenties but already rich and famous. I wondered if what he sang was just words to him. His voice argued otherwise. That old, weary voice knew what the high lonesome was. I’d heard Williams was bad to drink. There was something deep inside him that money and fame couldn’t cure. I reckoned it must be in a lot of us since his records were so popular. Loneliness was a word you could give it, but it was something beyond words. It was a kind of yearning, a sense that part of your heart was unfilled.

A preacher would say it was man’s condition since leaving Eden, and so many of the old hymns were about how in another life we’d be with God. But we lived in the here and now. You tried to find something to fill that absence. Maybe a marriage could cure that yearning, though mine hadn’t. Drink did it for many a man besides Williams. Maybe children filled it for some, or maybe like Daddy even the love of a place that connected you to generations of your family.

‘Wake up, Sheriff. We’re back,’ Bobby said. I opened my eyes.

‘You go on home, Bobby. I’ll meet you here at 8:30.’

I went into the office, walking past the cell I thought for a few minutes this evening I was going to fill. The book Mrs. Pipkin had brought lay on my desk. A damp cellar smell rose off the old paper when I opened it.
Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West
Florida
, the cover page said. Below the title,
By William Bartram
.

The first splats of rain streaked the windows, and though I hadn’t even a tomato plant in the ground, memory made my heart lift. I knew Daddy heard that rain, and Travis did too. They would sleep better tonight than they’d slept in weeks.

I knew I should call Janice, but I couldn’t make my hands pick up the telephone. Sometime tomorrow I would have to figure out the words I would say to her and then say them, as I had the first time I’d left.

‘I’d end up getting drafted anyhow,’ I’d told her when I joined the Marines in 1941. But I’d wanted to go. I’d wanted to get away from her, away from a life that had been something so different from what had seemed promised, away from my dead-end job in a cotton mill, away from that miscarriage and a marriage that we both knew was a failure. How could it not be when all our union had brought into the world was death.

But I had come back to Seneca and Janice. Maybe it had been a sense of obligation, of knowing that Janice had chosen me when there were plenty of other men from wealthy families she could have had. I now believed it was more than that though. I believed that our lost child had bonded us in ways that outlasted even love.

I opened the brittle pages to Part II, the section where Bartram left Charleston for what would be called for a few more years the Cherokee Nation. I followed his words the way he’d followed the Savannah River upstream to where the land became hills and then mountains. I turned the page, and Bartram was describing the place where my grandfather’s great-grandfather had settled twelve years before Bartram passed through that valley.

I continued on again three or four miles, keeping on the trading path which
led me over uneven rocky land, and crossing rivulets and brooks, rapidly
descending over rocky precipices, when I came into a charming vale, embellished
with a delightful glittering river, which meandered through it.

He had been from Scotland, that first Alexander, a man who had fought with Prince Charlie at the battle of Cullodden. He’d come down the Shenandoah Valley. Ian Alexander found his wife in southwest Virginia, a woman named Mary Thomas, who being Welsh would have shared his hatred of the English. He stayed there five years, then came farther south, stopping in this place that surely reminded him of the Scottish midlands where he’d been born. Most of his neighbors were Cherokee, and his oldest son would marry a Cherokee. But soon Colonel Williamson would push the Indians into the high mountains of North Carolina.

My Uncle Thomas had not known which side that first Alexander had supported. He must have seen what the British were doing to the Cherokee was the same thing they’d done to the Scots, but with the Indians gone there would be more land for whites like him. More interesting, what had his son done? Did he fight with his wife’s people or against them? Something had happened, but it was lost now in the valley’s past.

Bartram did not mention meeting anyone as he’d passed through Jocassee that spring day. But I wondered if Ian Alexander had stood in a field and watched Bartram as he rode his horse along the trading path. Perhaps Old Ian acknowledged the white stranger with a wave, perhaps a meal offered and accepted.

I read on, following Bartram as he moved northwest and crossed what would someday be a state line. He’d stopped and rested at the top of Oconee Mountain. Turning to look back on the land he’d traversed that day, Bartram had described what he saw.
The mountainous wilderness
appearing undulated as the great ocean after a tempest
, he’d written, as if he’d witnessed the valley buried under a huge, watery silence two centuries before it would happen.

Like Michaux, Bartram was a naturalist. He understood that things disappeared. Maybe that was why he’d felt compelled to preserve with sketches and words everything he saw, from Cherokee council-houses to buffalo bones. He wanted to get it all down. He wanted things to be remembered.

I lay the book down. The rain drummed against the roof and the town was quiet and still I was tired, tireder than I’d been in a long time. I went into the cell and lay down on the cot.

I dreamed of water deep as time.

Sunlight streaked through the bars when I woke. The telephone was ringing, so I stumbled out of the cell to my desk.

‘Daddy’s had another heart attack,’ Travis said.

‘Where is he?’

‘Over here at the hospital’

‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ I said.

I wrote a note telling Bobby to go on up to Jocassee and start dragging the river, that I’d join them soon as I could.

At the hospital I found Travis and Laura slouched in plastic chairs. The twins lay on the couches.

‘How bad is it?’ I asked Travis.

‘The doctor says he might live a day or two, but he ain’t going to leave here alive.’

‘What happened?’

‘Shank of the evening I went over to work some more on his roof. I figured he was mending fence so I didn’t start no searching till near dark. I found him in the far pasture.’

Travis looked at the floor.

‘I thought he was dead. It’d be better if he had been.’

‘Did you try to call me last night?’ ‘No,’ Travis said, stiIl looking at the floor.

‘Why the hell not?’

Travis looked up, his gray eyes meeting mine.

‘You ain’t given a damn about him for so long I didn’t think you’d want your sleep bothered.’