One Foot in Eden (20 page)

Sheriff Alexander didn’t put his glasses back on right then. He just looked up and let his gray eyes fix on me like a hawk’s eyes on a meadow mouse.

‘I’m going to lay it all out on the table for you, Billy,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll let you have your say.’

Sheriff Alexander put his glasses back on. They made his eyes bigger, not so much anymore like hawk’s eyes as owl’s eyes.

He went at me pretty lively for a few minutes, trying to rile me, get me to say something I’d not meant to. But I didn’t rise to his bait.

‘Let’s go have a look at that horse,’ he finally said.

We waded the same shallows where I’d crossed Sam, then walked down the river and into the woods. If you can get through this you’ll be O.K., I said in my mind. I kept telling myself that till we stepped into the stand of yellow poplar.

Buzzards covered Sam like a quilt. You couldn’t see a bit of hide and there was a dozen other buzzards skipping and flapping around looking for openings to poke their beaks in. More was up in the trees. I could hear them flapping and rustling up there but how many I couldn’t say. I kept my eyes looking down.

Sheriff Alexander put the nose rag to his face and waded in amongst the buzzards, kicking at them till they scattered enough to give him a gander. Then he stepped back and the buzzards closed back in on Sam like knottyheads on stickbait.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said, and I didn’t argue otherwise.

We crossed the river and I stepped back into the field to finish topping the tobacco.

Sheriff Alexander watched me a couple of minutes. I wondered if he recollected what it was like not to have a steady paycheck, to work months and not know if you’d make money that year or not. I wondered if he recollected how it’s a different sun in August, a sun that lays heavier on a man’s shoulders, like maybe the Dog Star’s mashing its weight down on you as well. Maybe he did remember. Maybe that was why he lived and worked in town.

‘I got to go back to Seneca for a while,’ he finally said. ‘But I got one question I’ve been puzzling over. How’d you get a horse with a broke leg across that river?’

That was a question I hadn’t figured to be asked. Sheriff Alexander’s eyes watched me and didn’t blink. Owl eyes, I thought, wise eyes that don’t miss a thing. I had to think out a answer and put a bridle on my tongue till I was sure I had it. Cicadas sang in the trees, making it harder to crosshair my mind. I finally rooted up a likely seeming answer.

I could tell what I spoke didn’t satisfy him but he just walked on up the field edge to his car. Sheriff Alexander drove back to Seneca and I went to the house for noon-dinner.

They came back in the afternoon. Five cars of searchers flocked in my yard, Sheriff Alexander giving them their orders. Then it was like a army again, this time wading across the river and moving up the slope of Licklog Mountain. Sheriff Alexander and Bobby searched at the house while Tommy Watson and another man was grappling in the river some more. I stayed in my field, topping and worming my tobacco, trying my best not to act like I knew there was thirty men searching every inch of my farm to get me in the chair.

I quit my work before they did, walking back to the house for my supper. The gloaming set in before they gave up. The searchers came straggling back out of the shadow of Licklog Mountain. All they had to show for their work was chigger bites and beggar lice. They piled back in their cars and Sheriff Alexander and Bobby Murphree got in their car too. Amy was putting up the supper dishes but I lagged by the window as Sheriff Alexander’s law car bumped down the washout. As I watched I figured me and Amy had got through the tangliest part of the briar patch. If we could hold on to our story a couple more days we’d be O.K.

Then I saw the brake lights come on, glowing red in the gloaming like blood. Sheriff Alexander turned the car around.

‘He’s coming back,’ I told Amy.

In that second I felt feather-legged as the moment I’d shot Holland. I knew he’d thought of something, something that wouldn’t wait for a tomorrow. He came up on the porch and knocked on the door jamb. He knocked confident.

‘Come on,’ he said, and nodded me toward the car where Bobby Murphree poked around in the trunk, ‘and bring a lantern. We need to go back over to where that horse is.’

When he said that I felt my heart start beating against my ribs like a quail caught in a snare. Calm down, I said to myself. I glanced at Amy and saw there was some scared in her too. For a second I thought of going for the ax next to the kindling. But it was just that, a thought. I’d killed one more man than enough for me.

Amy reached me a lantern and I lit it.

‘Step ahead of us and be the bell-cow,’ Sheriff Alexander said. ‘I’d rather see a snake before I put my foot down on him.’

‘What you got on your mind, Sheriff?’ Bobby Murphree asked as we followed the field edge to the water.

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

The strut in his words laid heavy on my mind as we waded across. I recollected what I’d heard about the Columbia jailhouse, the way men lived in packs like wolves and did things you wouldn’t want to dwell on to those that wasn’t a part of their pack. I was thinking I’d be looking forward to the state killing me after a few months being sport for such men.

But I knew that to be a lie quick as I thought it. I’d still want to live, no matter what men might do to me in jail. If I did have to die I couldn’t think of no worse way than a sit-down in the electric chair.

I led Sheriff Alexander and Bobby Murphree into the woods, walking slow, waving the lantern low in front of me for Sheriff Alexander was right that copperheads and satinbacks liked to crawl at night. My mind was near as fevered as it had been when I killed Holland, for I recollected what I’d been told about Ansel Crowe when the state killed him for a murder over in Long Creek.

His family went down to Columbia for the execution. Ansel’s brother had told me how they’d watched through a big piece of glass while the guards strapped Ansel in and then put a hood over his face. That had made it worse, because Ansel was jerking his head all every way to keep them from getting the hood on, trying to gain himself a few seconds. When they’d turned on the electricity Ansel’s body tried to raise up out of the chair. His hood had caught fire like a match. The warden had told Ansel’s family he’d felt never a thing but like Ansel’s brother had said, how the hell did that warden know what Ansel had felt.

I tried not to think about Ansel but I couldn’t forget it. The lantern got trembly in my hand. Only the dark kept Sheriff from knowing the state I was in.

You’ll walk this slow when they take you to the electric chair, I said in my mind but it was as like the woods had whispered it to me. My legs buckled and I almost fell. If I had I’d of been too feather-legged to get up. I’d of probably broke down and confessioned it all right then and there.

‘Watch yourself,’ Sheriff Alexander said.

Yes, I told myself, watch yourself. Don’t give yourself away. Make them show Holland’s body to you. I took slow breaths trying to settle myself as we stopped in front of the white oak.

A possum wiggled out of a hole in Sam’s flank like it was getting born. It was bloated like a tick, its belly rubbing the ground. The possum raised its bat face and hissed before heading toward the river.

‘We got to move that horse,’ Sheriff Alexander said. He looked at Bobby Murphree.

‘Do you think if we put a rope around its neck we could drag it a few yards?’

I didn’t know the exact of what he was studying. What I did know was he hadn’t raised that lantern toward the white oak’s branches or told Bobby Murphree to shimmy up the tree. Keep calm, I told myself for the hundredth time since dawn, and keep a bridle on your mouth.

‘We can try,’ Bobby Murphree said.

He made a noose and tightened it around Sam’s neck. He didn’t take a breath while he did it and came back over to us sucking air like he’d been underwater.

‘You help too,’ Sheriff Alexander said to me.

The three of us gripped the rope end and dragged Sam till Sheriff Alexander said stop. He took the shovel and stepped to where Sam had laid and stabbed the ground a few times.

Sheriff Alexander looked up at me like I had doublecrossed him somehow and I knew if he didn’t reckon where Holland was in the next minute or so he never would if he lived a hundred years. Because he was shutting away a possibility the same way you nail a board over a well you’re sure has gone dry.

We recrossed the river. As we came up the bank I smelled rain. The cicadas had quieted some and I reckoned they smelled it too. I wondered if maybe there was something to killing blacksnakes after all.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Sheriff Alexander said when we got to the house. ‘Who knows what might turn up, especially after a good rain.’

But his voice had no swagger like it had earlier. He was fishing with a bare hook and the both of us knew it.

I stepped inside the house and watched the law car’s red tail lights disappear down the washout. This time Sheriff Alexander didn’t stop and turn around.

‘I think everything is going to be all right,’ I told Amy, and she nodded. She came over and hugged me, the baby pressing my belly.

‘There have been times of late I’d never have believed it,’ Amy said. ‘But I almost can now.’

I kissed Amy on the cheek.

‘I’m out to the shed to start on that crib.’

‘You ain’t obliged to just for me,’ Amy said. ‘It can wait if you’re wore out.’

‘I don’t mind none,’ I said. ‘I won’t tarry longer than to get a start on it.’

I poked around the shed a while and finally settled on some wild cherry I’d put an axe to last winter. It was pretty wood and I knew it would please Amy. I sat down at my lathe and busied myself, pumping the lathe and working the wood with the chisel. The lantern light was shadowy but it was enough. The wild cherry had a bright smell, like honeysuckle. The breeze made the shed door creak.

Bring that rain this way, wind, I said to myself, bring enough to keep me out of my fields and in this shed come tomorrow, a big enough rain to wash the Dog Star out of the sky. That wood felt right and comfortable in my hands. It was a happy kind of work making that crib and I soon lost myself in it, the way you can when you’re doing something pleasing.

Amy came to fetch me after a while, though it was hard to know if ten minutes or two hours had passed. We went to bed and joined flesh again. It was different than the night before, not so much needful but sweet and contenting.

Afterward I laid there, my hand on Amy’s belly. For the first time I duly felt that young one was mine too and that damped my eyes. I made promises to myself and to God to be a good daddy. I thought about the sinner on the cross Jesus had saved and prayed God and Jesus to forgive me. Unlike my prayer in the white oak, I reckoned this one might have a chance of being heard.

I felt the baby kick and at the same moment the window lighted up. Signs of new beginnings, I thought. The cicadas was hushed in the trees and it was like the whole world was quiet and listening. A breeze lifted the curtains on the window. I heard the first grumble of thunder coming across Sassafras Mountain.

It wasn’t long before drops of rain tapped the roof and that’s the best sound ever I’ve known to make a body drowsy. I knew if I rathered I could be asleep quick as a cat. But I didn’t want to sleep yet, because for the first time in months I didn’t feel a loneliness in my heart. I just wanted to lay there with that good feeling awhile.

Amy nuzzled her back closer to my chest. The rain came harder, setting in like a dog settles in front of a hearth. I let my thoughts carry out the window to the corn and beans and the splats of rain turning dust back to dirt. I thought of the roots sipping up that rain and it raising through stalks and stems like a river reversing and going up its prongs. I knew many of my plants it was too late for but some would make it. That was a high yield to what I’d of expected yesterday.

I felt the young one stir again and told myself my luck had changed, was changing with every drop of rain that fell on my thirsty fields. Next spring I’d plant just tobacco in my bottomlands and I’d have electricity and a new truck come harvest time. That’s what I told myself as I let sleep fall over me like warm rain.