Only the Truth (16 page)

"What did she do that got her arrested in Arkansas?"

The Chief spoke up for me again.

"Let's just say Kristen got in some trouble there."

Jim muttered, "I bet."

The lady spoke up. She looked to be the age Charlene's parents would have
been.

"What does Mr. Hutchins want to know?"

The moment had finally come and I wasn't sure now what it was I did want to
know.

"I...I...," the words wouldn't come out of my mouth.
"I...I…...I just want to know...," and then I knew what I needed to
know. "I just want to know if Char...Kristen...was always bad."

The pastor spoke first.

"I wouldn't say she was always bad, Mr. Hutchins. She was a lovely
little girl if I remember correctly. She used to like to help put flowers in the
church and when she got to be about eleven or twelve, she would run errands for
some of our elderly parishioners."

"And she did babysit my kids when she turned twelve," the lady
broke in. I notice she flinched a little but then she said, "My children always
liked her and she treated the kids well."

Jim grunted. "Yeah, and then she got pregnant. She was all of thirteen.
She was hell after that on her family. I remember her daddy telling me she
would sneak out and lie and wouldn't even tell him which boys she was running
with."

The other white man spoke up. "That's when the
Stoddards
started homeschooling. They were too embarrassed to have their daughter showing
up with her big belly in school."

The pastor sighed. "Yes, it was a very difficult time for Thomas and
Mary. Why Mary stopped coming to church even though most folks tried to be
kindly toward her. She hardly left the house except to go to her sister's for
weekends over in New Freedom. I guess that's how she escaped the problems she
was having with Kristen."

The lady said, "Yes, she left Thomas to handle Kristen and keep her in
line, keep her from going out and getting pregnant again."

"Yeah, he didn't have much luck with that," the other white man
said. "For all his locking the house down, she still found a way to get
around him."

I had one more question. My voice shook. "So why did she do what she
did?"

The pastor clasped his hands together and pressed them against his mouth.

"We can't know just why, Mr. Hutchins. Sometimes when people start
going down a path of deceit and ruin, they take everyone with them. All we have
ever been able to gather was that Kristen wanted what she wanted and when she
decided to run away with Rubin Covey, she eliminated everything that stood in
her way. She must have lost whatever flame of compassion she had when she was
younger. Her parents and her children, they must just have become a problem for
her and she found a way to solve her problem by erasing them from her
world."

Jim blurted out, "Psycho. That's what she is."

I didn't have anything more to ask. All I knew was, at one time, Charlene
was nice and then she was not. I thought it would make me feel better to know
she had been good sometime earlier in her life, but now it just made me feel
sadder. I wished I could have been in Jenkins when she was thirteen. Maybe I
could have been enough to her back then to keep her from going bad.

Chief Williams stood up. "Thanks.
All of you.
I am sure Mr. Hutchins appreciated your willingness to come forward and speak
with him.”

I nodded. "Thanks." It came out more like a whisper.

As we all stood up, the pastor came over and put his hands on my shoulders.

"Son," he said in his deep voice, "Remember God works in
mysterious ways. I don't know why Kristen came into your life, but maybe there
is something you learned from your experience with her."

I thought about the two nice years I had with Charlene and wondered how it
helped that God gave me a nice present and then took it away from me.

"And something brought you here to us, Mr. Hutchins. Maybe there is
something in that."

He smiled at me and took his hands from my shoulders.

I looked past him into the pretty church. It was true I never had been away
from home and I had met some nice people here and I liked coming to the church
service.

We started to leave the room when one of the black men finally spoke.

He was baldheaded, about seventy. He peered into my face curiously.

He spoke to the other black man.

"
Ain't
he the spitting image of
Cesford
Covey? Rubin Covey's great uncle?"

The air suddenly sucked out of the room.

Chief Williams spun around.

"What did you say, Albert?"

Albert straightened up and wagged his arthritic finger at me.

"He looks just like
Cesford
Covey, I swear.
Wasn't he from Arkansas, Willie?" he asked glancing over his shoulder at
his friend.

The look the Chief gave me could have chilled a bowl of chicken soup in
August.

He turned and strode out of the church without another word to me.

I slowly walked stiff-legged down the aisle to the door and out alone onto
the street. My head felt empty. I looked up at the night sky and the stars were
hidden behind the clouds. I knew they were there, but like the truth, there
didn't seem to be any way to find them, make them show their faces.

I felt a tug at my jacket sleeve.

"Mr. Hutchins?" The girl belonging to the hand pulling at my elbow
spoke in a tiny voice which matched her small frame and the wisps of brown hair
that curved around her head like a Christmas wreath.

"I was Kristen's friend."

I started to turn away. I didn't really want to hear any more. There was no
point.

"Please," she insisted and when I turned back, she smiled a
little.

"I just want to tell you that Kristen didn't go crazy until her father
started locking her up. The way the others tell it, she was causing problems
that made Mr. Stoddard have to be real strict with her. But, I don't remember
it that way. Kristen sort of disappeared one day, stopped hanging out with me,
and then next I saw her she was pregnant. I tried to talk to her but she told
me to go away and leave her alone."

The girl looked paler than she had when I first saw her.

"I was a stupid teenager and I was mad at her for giving me the cold
shoulder and I never bothered with her again."

She opened her purse and took out a tiny rectangle.

"I kept this all these years in my wallet." She handed it to me.
"
Here.
You take it."

She snapped her purse shut. "Maybe I could have been a better
friend," she said. Then she turned away from me and walked off.

I started walking toward the police department building, looking at the
little picture of Charlene. She must have been maybe twelve or thirteen in it.
Her eyes were bright, her hair shiny and falling in big waves over her
shoulders. She was smiling like she was really happy. I wondered what happened
to that Charlene. I got to the building and I slid the picture into my pocket.

I pushed open the door and walked straight to the police chief's office.

He was sitting in his chair waiting for me like a hungry lion.

He immediately rose to his feet.

"You, Mr. Hutchins who-never-knew-Rubin Covey...," he said with a
good deal of sarcasm, "You will be gracing my jail for another
night." He shoved me down the hall, opened the lock noisily, and put me
inside the cell. He looked at me and shook his head.

"I don't know what game you are playing but you almost had me, Mr.
Hutchins."

He slammed the door, stomped down the corridor and hit the light switch.
Except for a tiny light by the commode in the corner of the cell, I was in the
dark. I curled into a ball on the cot and hoped I could just stay that way
forever.

********************

I only had a few minutes of peace. My mind started whirring, thoughts
jumping all around, scenes of Charlene and me back at the house, Charlene with
her fake mother, Charlene as the pretty little girl in the photo, Charlene
giving a blow job to the jailer.

Then I saw the pretty church and Mrs. Covey's house. I wished I could spend
more time in her home, watching her cook in the kitchen, sitting in her "
parlour
" being given tea. I imagined how it might be
if Chief Williams wasn't mad at me and we could sit and talk some more about
anything that didn't have to do with Charlene and her lover, Rubin Covey.

Rubin Covey,
Cesford
Covey, I didn't know them.
But, then I never knew anyone. I just knew my mother was Bess Hutchins and my
daddy was Clifford Hutchins and my aunt and uncle, they were Hutchins, too. I
never heard any other names but Hutchins.

I don't know when I finally fell asleep but I was glad I did.

Chief Williams came to my cell right at 8:00 am. He didn't say good morning.

I got up from my cot and looked him right in his face.

"I want to go see Mrs. Covey," I said, my voice steady and sure.

He nodded, just barely, and we walked in silence out of the building. We
rode over to her house without saying a word.

When I opened the door to get out, he said, "When you're finished here,
you walk back to the station." He looked at me with his dark eyes,
unblinking. "If you skip town before I tell you I'm finished with you,
I'll put a warrant out for your arrest. Do you understand?"

I didn't have to answer. I closed the car door and walked up the steps to
Mrs. Covey's front door. I knocked lightly, and then harder, until she came
half-asleep to the door.

Her hair was in a pink hair net and she had a thick robe tied around her
pajamas. Her feet were bare and I noticed her toes were crooked. Her face
pulled together like a crumpled napkin and she said, "What the hell are
you doing here at this hour? Mercy," she huffed but she took one look at
my crusty face and let me in.

"What's ailing you?" she asked. "And why did the Chief dump
you at my door and speed off like that?"

I told her what happened at the church and that someone said I was a Covey
or looked like a Covey.

"Let me get dressed," she said, and when she came back, she made
us some coffee and gave me a piece of apple Danish warmed up.

She took charge. "Okay. Let's get to the bottom of this. Come on into
the basement room and we'll start looking through the boxes I haven't been into
for years. They got all kinds of family stuff, photos,
birth
certificates. Maybe we will find that missing link between you and Rubin before
the Chief comes back and charges you with obstruction of justice and arrests
you for aiding and abetting a wanted man." She harrumphed which I didn't
quite get the meaning of any more than I understood all that law language that
probably just meant jail for me.

Mrs. Covey opened up a big storage closet and told me to start hauling boxes
out. We pulled apart the tucked in cardboard on the top of the boxes and
started going through the Covey history.

"This is my grandmother, Beatrice," she said. "Her last name
was Thompson." She raised her eyebrows at me. I shook my head. "Well,
probably we can skip my side of the family. You are supposed to be related to
Rubin." The sound of his name made me uncomfortable, but, I was going to
hear it over and over again throughout the morning.

"Rubin's aunt, Geraldine Crooks."

"Rubin's uncle, Carroll. He lived out in Georgia."

"Oh, here, is something interesting. It's a letter from Bridgeport,
Arkansas." Mrs. Covey opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper. "Oh,
never mind. This was from my sister when she went there for a teaching job for
three months."

"Rubin's…..now, I don't know who this is." She handed me a picture
of some man with bushy hair. He didn't look like anyone I had ever known.

We went through eight boxes by 11 am. All the Covey's were starting to look
the same to me. So far none of them had my face. We found no birth certificates
or marriage certificates or wills from Whitfield Glen or any other place in
Arkansas. We didn't find any stuff about this great-uncle of Rubin, this
Cesford
Covey. By the time we were on the ninth box, I felt
like I knew the Coveys real well.

Mrs. Covey hesitated before she opened the last box. She placed her hands on
top of it like she was either giving it a blessing or she was not going to let
out whatever was inside. There were some words written on the outside in black
magic marker and a red heart with an arrow through it.

"What is it?" I asked.

Mrs. Covey took her hands away from the box top and turned the box to the
side with the heart and writing.

"It says ‘Rubin and Alma.’ That's me," she pointed at herself.
"Alma."

She pulled open the top.

"Thirty years," she said under her breath. "And it all comes
down to this." And she looked at me as though I was the one carrying the
plague, the Kristen plague.

She handed me a black-and-white photo.

"That's us on our first date."

Mrs. Covey and Rubin stood side by side in clothes that would have made me
laugh under some other circumstance. They looked nice together. They were
smiling and gazing at each other. You could tell they were in love.

She handed me another one.

She didn't need to explain. She was wearing a white wedding dress in it.
Rubin seemed happy to be marrying her. He had a big grin on his face, white
teeth gleaming into the camera.

She handed me one picture after the other, glancing at it and then letting
me take a look. We made a stack of them on the floor. I didn't see any pictures
of children.

"I couldn't have any," she said and I didn't ask anything more
about that.

The Covey's faces grew older in the pictures as we worked our way toward the
bottom of the box.