Let Me Die in His Footsteps (21 page)

“Can I?” she says again.

Ellis stops, leans on the shovel. “This man ain’t your father.”

“He is.”

“No, darling, he ain’t. Sorry to say I don’t know who is. Thought it might have even been me, but there’s no Baine in you. Too pretty to be a Baine. Sorry, but that ain’t your daddy down there.”

“Annie,” Mama calls out. “Your father will be wondering.”

Annie backs away as Ellis Baine starts digging and tossing again. He said it so easily: He’s not her daddy, and neither is Joseph Carl. Ever since seeing Ellis Baine there on her porch, and him looking into her black eyes with such ease, she’d almost been hoping it would be him. Ellis Baine isn’t better than many, but he’s better than Joseph Carl. He’s a good enough fellow to say Annie isn’t the daughter of the man lying under that hole. She’d have thought there would be some peace in knowing the truth, but it only makes her sorry for asking, like she’s being ungrateful for the daddy she has.

“You kill my Aunt Juna?”

The words come spilling out before she can think about rudeness and presumption and all the other rules of fine manners Mama has tried to impart.

This makes Ellis Baine laugh out loud. “Done a few things with your Aunt Juna, but killing her ain’t one of them.”

“Some other Baine do it?”

He shakes his head.

“You were up there that night,” Annie says. “It was you.”

“Was me.”

“Looking for Aunt Juna?”

He twists up his mouth in that way a person does when they don’t know the answer to something. “I suppose if you’re asking me did I kill her,” he says, kicking the mud off his shovel, “that means you ain’t seen her lately.”

“Never seen her.”

His eyes widen, and he nods. “That so?”

“That’s so,” Annie says.

“But you think she’s back?” He jams the clean shovel in the ground and leans on it. He’s heard the rumors like everyone else. “Why is that?”

“Don’t matter,” Annie says, too embarrassed to tell him about the know-how and the rocker and the sizzle in the air. She also doesn’t want to tell him she found Juna’s cigarettes the same time she found his dead mama.

“Good enough,” he says, lifting a hand to Mama and giving her a friendly nod. “Guess you’d better get on. But tell me something first.” He reaches in his front pocket and pulls out a deck of cards tied off with a red rubber band. He tosses them to Annie. “These belong to you?”

Using both hands, Annie snatches them from the air. It’s the faded red deck with sailboats drawn on the back of each card. “No, sir, but you took them from our kitchen.”

“Yep,” he says. “You know where they come from?”

Annie stares down on them. “The store?”

He shakes his head. “You find out where those come from, will you? Maybe tell me next time we run into each other.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Not sure,” he says, giving Annie another wave to get on. “But I’m supposing it’ll be soon enough.”

1936—SARAH AND JUNA

IT’S BEEN FIVE
minutes, maybe ten, since folks learned Joseph Carl is already dead. Someone gathers Juna and me. A hand cups the small of my back and must do the same to Juna because we move forward together at the same pace and in the same direction. I think it must be Daddy, but the hand is strong and firm and certain. It’s not Daddy.

Our smoky breath comes more quickly, filling the air around us. The hand forces me ahead, faster with each step. It guides us beyond the gallows. Folks, their heads tilted up so they can shout at Sheriff Irlene and the others, stumble aside and allow us to pass. I look up to see who has come for Juna and me, and I trip over one of the many people. The hand grabs the back of my collar and gives a yank, saves me from falling. It’s John Holleran, staring straight ahead. I ask him what is happening. Where’s Daddy? Where are you taking us? He doesn’t answer.

John walks with us until we reach the sheriff’s office. He shoves at the men who shout questions and slaps away the pencils and paper they wave in our faces. Someone asks would we be still a moment for a picture and John knocks a camera to the ground. It shatters at our feet. The door to the small office opens, we stumble through, and it closes behind.

Abigail Watson is the first person I see once inside. She sits in the same chair where Juna had sat the night Sheriff Irlene first arrested Joseph Carl. A silver tray rests on her lap. Joseph Carl’s final meal, except he never ate it and the tray is still full. It’s Mrs. Brashear’s cornbread smothered with beans and a sliced melon. Abigail’s grandparents must have dropped her here and then gone on to the hanging. I stare at the tray and wonder where Mrs. Brashear managed to find melon. What a shame Joseph Carl never got to enjoy it.

By the time I have pulled off my jacket, scarf, and gloves, John Holleran is gone. I swing around, looking for him, call out his name. I look to Abigail, and she points one slender finger at the door. She’s wearing white gloves as she might for Easter or on Christmas Eve. She means to tell me John is gone. When she lowers her hand and places them both back in her lap, I glance around the rest of the room.

While John is gone, Daddy is still here. From the looks of the room, he’s been railing, throwing things, and likely cursing. His hat has been knocked to the floor, his hair sticks to his forehead where he’s sweated, and his chest is pumping like he just finished an uphill climb. He’s upended a lantern, its slender chimney broken in two large pieces. A chair lies on its side, a stack of papers is scattered across the floor as if blown from the desk by a gust of wind, and a three-legged stool now has only two legs. At the sight of me, he reaches for my hand and drags me across the floor.

“No, Daddy,” I say.

He reaches for Juna too, but she is ahead of us and already stands outside the back room. The door is open, and I see the soles of two boots. I pull against Daddy, lean away with all my weight. Juna glances back and then walks inside, where Joseph Carl is laid out on a table, laid out there so Daddy and Juna and I can see for certain he’s dead.

Daddy says we have to see for ourselves and that we have to touch Joseph Carl or he’ll haunt us all the rest of our days. Juna nods as Daddy says this and walks farther on into the room. I don’t move, so Daddy grabs me again, this time with both hands, drags me through the open door, and I wish John Holleran were here.

John won’t come to the house ever again, not even to see Daddy or to ask after what chores need doing. He’ll always remember the sight of me and Ellis Baine’s fingers brushing against the tip of my breast. It’ll make him close his eyes tight, shake his head. He’ll surely have imagined the day he’d see me in that way, standing bare before him. He’ll have dreamed of that moment, thought he’d be my husband and I’d be his wife. He’s never much believed in his mama’s know-how, not like other folks, but it always made him happy to hear her say he and I were marked for a future together. He would wink at me, smile, tell his mama all in good time. But now, the sight of me and the memory of me offering myself to Ellis Baine is the thing that has made John Holleran hate for the first time in his life.

Lying there on that table, Joseph Carl looks smaller than he ever did in life. But the same happened to Dale. So quickly, he faded and withered, and now the same has become of Joseph Carl. He wears a blue flannel shirt buttoned up under his chin and at both wrists. His hair, though unwashed, is smooth as if someone drew a comb through it and flattened it down after with the palm of her hand. He wears a leather belt and dark trousers. After it was over, sometime in the middle of the night, Joseph Carl’s mama came and did this for him. She dressed him and tended his hair and probably wiped his face and dug the dirt from under his nails. I know now. This is why John Holleran had come to Ellis’s house. He wasn’t trailing after me. He had come to tell Ellis that Joseph Carl was gone, but instead he found me.

Daddy pushes me toward the body, shoves me so I stumble up next to Joseph Carl. Juna already stands there, and at her side stands Abigail. I didn’t see her set her tray aside and walk into the room. Daddy had to drag me, but Abigail must have come on her own. Her grandmother has pulled Abigail’s hair back for this occasion and tied it off with a bow and dressed the child in her best cotton dress. She’s sprouted since last summer, and now the dress is short in the arms and the hem rides a few inches too high, showing her brown boots. Dale was Abigail’s only friend. Now she’ll spend all her days with Abraham. Juna wraps one arm around Abigail’s shoulders, and her other hand hovers just above Joseph Carl’s brow. She looks as if to press her hand to his forehead in search of a fever like I used to do for Dale when he was feeling poorly.

“I wanted to see,” she says, drawing her hand over Joseph Carl’s head, smoothing his hair the same as his mama must have done. “I wanted to see a man hanged.”

She trails that same hand down along Joseph Carl’s cheek, runs a finger over the crease between his lips like I’ve seen her do to Abraham Pace. It makes Abraham groan to have that done to him. He must miss it since he doesn’t come around anymore. Taking Abigail by the hand, Juna makes the girl touch Joseph Carl on the cheek. She doesn’t want his spirit haunting the child. At first, Juna guides Abigail’s hand, but then Abigail slides another step closer and, with both hands, cradles Joseph Carl’s face. Juna smiles, lifts her eyes, and looks at me.

I let myself, made myself, believe Joseph Carl had done it. He told Sheriff Irlene where Dale could be found, and so he had to have been there, had to have seen and done those things to Dale. It was the only way I could bear the trial and the thought of what would come to pass. But I could only prop up that belief for a short while. Seeing Juna stroke this dead man’s cheek and trail her fingers over his thin, pale lips, I know the chill that works its way from my toes into my knees and on up into my stomach is the knowing that Joseph Carl didn’t do the things to Dale that led to him dying, but someone else did.

Juna has made these things happen and made people believe. Even me. This is the reason Daddy won’t look her in the eye or give her a chance to work her way into his thoughts. Juna is smarter than we are, has a way of working things out long before they’ve come to pass. I always thought, hoped, Daddy was cowardly and superstitious for all his fears of Juna. I think now Daddy is the wisest among us.

Maybe what Juna says next frightens me because those eyes of hers are black. Maybe if a person with ordinary brown eyes had said it, my breathing wouldn’t have picked up. It’s the way she speaks softly, as if to a child, as if to the baby who grows inside. It’s the way her lids close and open again slowly and with thought, her not wanting even to disturb Joseph Carl with the sound of her blinking eyes.

But Juna is the one who says it. Juna, with her black eyes who tilts her head in such an odd fashion. Juna says it, and I know she’s the reason Dale is dead. I don’t know why or what she did, but she is a woman who would see her own brother die and an innocent man hang, and I begin to fear for Ellis Baine and John Holleran and even my own daddy.

“Do you suppose,” Juna says, smiling as she cups Joseph Carl’s chin with her hands, “they might hang another?”

•   •   •

JOSEPH CARL’S MAMA
wanted him buried alongside his daddy, but folks wouldn’t have it. They gave her two days to mourn her son, and today he’ll be buried at the crossroad into town so the comings and goings of all the many travelers will keep his spirit from rising up. Maybe folks want this, for Joseph Carl to be buried where the dirt piled on top of him will be trampled and trodden each and every day, because they believe he’s evil for what he did, or maybe, like me, they know he didn’t do any of those things. Like me, they know someone else hurt Dale and that someone is likely here among us, and so now they’re the evil ones for wanting Joseph Carl dead, for thinking his dying would make their lives good again. They want the comings and goings to keep Joseph Carl’s spirit at rest so they don’t have to fear they’ll one day get their own comeuppance.

As he did the day Joseph Carl was hanged, Daddy pushes us to the front of the crowd. Already he’s been drinking, though the chill of early morning still hangs in the air. He bumps up against people as he forces his way through, the smell of whiskey poured from a jar parting folks as much as Daddy’s hands and arms. Sheriff Irlene, wearing a long beige overcoat, her husband’s black boots peeking out from under her skirt as she moves among the onlookers, motions to two of her men and points in our direction. The men navigate the crowd, saying excuse me and pardon me as they go. They stand nearby, one on each side of Daddy, Juna, and me, maybe to protect Daddy from himself or maybe to protect the other folks.

Overhead, the sky has opened up, lifted high. And the sun is bright like only it can be on an autumn day. The chill in the air should awaken folks. It usually makes a man walk a bit livelier, stand a bit taller. Instead folks huddle against the cold, pull blankets around their shoulders, hug themselves but not others. There isn’t a single Baine among the crowd, not even Joseph Carl’s mama. There are men again holding shotguns at the ready to keep the family away.

“Bury him upside down,” someone shouts as four men appear, a slender pine box hoisted onto their shoulders.

“You all mind yourselves,” Sheriff Irlene calls out, waving a finger across the crowd. The men carrying the pine box keep coming. “We’ll have a Christian burial,” she says.

All the folks who came from across Kentucky and across the country have gone on home. They left behind trampled grass, piles of charred wood from their fires, empty longneck bottles. A few of the newspapermen have stayed and stand together at a safe distance from the crowd. One of the fellows taps his tablet with the blunt end of a pencil. He flips it around and starts to scribble on his lined paper when another fellow and yet another hollers out for Joseph Carl to be buried upside down.

When we settle at the front of the crowd, Sheriff Irlene’s men matching us step for step, Juna and I stand together, our shoulders touching, our heads bowed. I wrap my arm around her, want her to be happy, feel she is loved, because I’m afraid now of what she’ll do next. She liked the sight of Joseph Carl lying there on that table, the life gone from him. It made her smile and use her hands in the most tender of ways. I’m afraid she’ll want to do it again.

Like the gallows pounded together with threepenny nails, the box the men carry smells of freshly cut, sweet pine. Daddy staggers around the narrow, deep hole cut into the ground, sometimes swaying so close that one of Sheriff Irlene’s men must grab onto Daddy’s coat sleeve and yank him back to right. The men surely used picks along with their shovels to dig a hole so deep as this one. They’ll have hit limestone and broken through to be sure Joseph Carl is buried good and deep.

“Flip him,” another voice shouts and then another.

They want Joseph Carl buried upside down so if his spirit does awaken and try to claw its way out, it’ll find itself upside down and, as such, claw deeper into the ground.

“Turn him. Flip him.”

Sheriff Irlene continues calling out that there is no need for such things. She smiles each time she must say it and looks from the crowd to the newspapermen still standing together near the trees. They are all scribbling now and talking among themselves, likely wondering what is to be gained by burying a man upside down.

As people step aside to let the men carrying Joseph Carl pass, I see John Holleran. On the other side of the hole, he stands with his mama. They’ve placed themselves behind all the others who want to get a good look-see. John’s head is tipped as if he’s speaking to his mama, probably asking is she sure she wants to stay. He’ll take her on home, he’ll be saying. No need for all this.

Because John’s head is bowed, his hat hides all but a corner of his mouth and his chin. He wears the blue wool jacket that once hung so often from the back of one of my kitchen chairs, usually the one nearest the stove. The jacket is nearly worn through at the elbows. I told him once I’d stitch a few patches for him, but I never did. I lean left, pressing against Juna to get a better look at him. He lifts his head, and his eyes settle on mine. I would guess he lets out a long, slow breath. The crowd shifts, and he is gone from sight.

“Won’t do you no good,” Mary Holleran shouts. I know her voice even though I can’t see her. “Flipping that boy won’t change what’s been done.”

I still can’t see John, though I imagine he’ll have tugged his hat low over his eyes. He’s never believed much in the know-how, but others in town will think about what Mary’s said for a good long time. Maybe for the rest of their lives. They’ll think of Joseph Carl buried here at the crossroad, his body flipped upside down, and know that sometimes a thing done can never be undone.

The people nearest John and his mother drift away. When it seems certain Mary has nothing more to say, two more men join the four, and then two more, and the eight of them flip the casket. Another two cradle the box with thick leather straps that will take the weight without snapping. Two more join in, each grabbing hold of an end, and the four of them spread themselves evenly between the two straps. Half on one side of the hole, half on the other. The rest of the men walk away, and the four who remain brace themselves, holding the straps with two hands, digging the heels of their laced-up boots into the ground, leaning back to use their weight. They could be children playing tug-of-war. The ladies shield their eyes with kerchiefs. Children crouch at the hole’s edge, press two hands into the dirt, each of them leaning over it a little farther than the last, one getting hauled away by a hand that grabs hold of him by his collar.