One Foot in Eden (5 page)

‘It’s my plow horse,’ Billy said, hardly giving the buzzards a glance. ‘He broke his leg yesterday.’

And that set me back, set me back hard as if he’d suckerpunched me in the stomach. He couldn’t have come up with a lie that quick and delivered it that matter-of-fact, at least I didn’t believe he could.

‘That’s some hard luck,’ I told him.

We talked a couple more minutes, but before I could bring up what Mrs. Winchester had told me and Bobby, Tom and Leonard sloshed out of the river, Stonewall loping behind them.

‘Bring up anything?’ I asked.

Tom opened his pack to show a big trout the dynamite had blown out of the water. I pointed out the buzzards to them.

‘Damn,’ Bobby said. ‘I guess we been looking down when we should of been looking up.’

‘You want us to go look?’ Tom asked, but I told them I’d take care of that, for them to go on to town for lunch, round up some more men if they could and get back by two o’clock. They started to leave, but I nodded at Bobby to stay a few moments longer.

‘What you got the .12 gauge for?’ I asked Billy.

‘Groundhog been troubling my cabbage,’ he said, and that was a reasonable enough answer.

‘You seen him lately?’ I asked.

‘Who?’ Billy asked.

Smart, Billy,
I thought,
but be careful you don’t outsmart yourself.

‘The groundhog,’ I said.

‘No, I don’t expect I will with you all blasting up the river.’

‘Then you won’t mind Bobby taking your shotgun with him. We might need to check it if a body turns up. Besides, I don’t like to be around loaded guns. I’m bad superstitious that way.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Billy said, like it was no matter to him. Bobby picked up the gun and left. I squatted down and wiped my glasses, something to do while I thought about what should come next.

Leonard and Stonewall had come up with nothing. Neither had the men searching the water and woods. We’d search the other side of the river come afternoon, and Tom could take his grappling hook and dynamite farther downstream. Surely Holland’s body would show up by dusk.

But maybe I wouldn’t have to wait that long,
I thought. Maybe if I got under Billy Holcombe’s skin he might save me a few hours.

‘I’m going to give you the lay of the land, Billy,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll let you have your say. Mrs. Winchester says Holland was tomcatting around with your Missus. She believes you done shot and killed him for it.’

Come on, Billy
, I thought.
Get riled up. Tell me what a worthless son
of a bitch Holland was. I’ll not argue with the truth of that. Tell me how he
threatened you or your wife. Tell me how it was self-defense. Confess and
we’ll get this over with here and now.

‘That’s all lies,’ Billy said, but the lack of heat in his voice argued otherwise.

‘She claims she heard the shot.’

‘She heard me shoot my plow horse.’

‘She claims the shot was near your house,’ I said, not giving him much as a second between questions. ‘Maybe even inside it.’

‘She’s a old woman. She’s just addled.’

‘What about your wife and Holland?’ I asked.

‘That’s a lie.’

I looked at the buzzards. I’d have to walk over in a minute and make sure that was a horse they were drawn to. My knee wouldn’t enjoy risking a slip in the river, but there was nothing to be done about that.

‘So you wouldn’t have a problem with me checking inside your house?’

‘No,’ Billy said.

His face showed me little. He was getting more comfortable with his lies, like a card player learning how to bluff.

‘Or anywhere else on your land.’

‘No.’

‘And you shot that horse yesterday morning as well?’ He caught what I was trying to do.

‘I shot my horse yesterday morning, but I didn’t shoot nothing else.’

‘So your horse broke its leg plowing?’

‘Yes,’ Billy said. ‘I was plowing my cabbage and his hoof got slicked on a rock. I didn’t want to smell him so I took him over the river, put him back a ways in the woods.’

That made sense but only up to a point.
You may have gotten a bit
too clever for your own good, Billy
, I thought.

What I said was, ‘Let’s go have a look at that horse.’

I let Billy lead, both of us taking our time as we made our way down the bank. He stepped into the water, but slow and careful, careful beyond worrying about slipping. He was scared, scared because it was clear he couldn’t swim.
That would make it harder to sink a body deep where you’d
want it, Billy
, I thought.
It could still be done, but you’d have a rougher
time of it. Maybe that body is in the woods after all,
I told myself.

I stepped into the water right behind him, close enough to grab him if he slipped, if he tried to run when he got to the far bank. That would have been quite a spectacle, the two of us limping through the woods on our game legs, him trying to get away, me trying to catch up. But though I stayed close I really didn’t believe he’d run. Yesterday, that would have been the time for that. It was too late now, too late for a lot of things.

A crime of passion, Billy, that was your defense,
I thought as I followed him through the shallows.
You should have come into my office yesterday
and turned yourself in, telling it all up front about Holland and your wife,
You’d have probably gotten off light, Billy, even if it was a war hero you
killed. But you’ve messed up now. You hid your crime. You made it seem
calculated, premeditated.

The water rose to my knees but no higher.

Press a one-inch piece of curved metal with your index finger and your
world changes forever, doesn’t it, Billy
. Just a little thing like the pressing of a bit of metal, or a little thing like a teammate banging his shoulder pads into the side of your knee in a scrimmage—an accident, not even a hard hit, just a little popping sound inside your knee.

‘My father will help us’ was what Janice had said after Coach Barkley told me I no longer had a scholarship. I was married by then, Janice two months pregnant. What she meant was that her father would give us money to finish my teaching degree, money to help with the baby. But Janice had come back from her parents’ house with the news her father was poor as any Jocassee farmer. I dropped out of school to work at Liberty Mill. Then came the miscarriage, and hospital bills made sure not even night classes were a possibility.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she’d said that June night.

I’d reached up and turned on the lamp. Blood soaked the bed’s center, the blood of our child. We frantically pushed away from the sagging middle of the bed—away from each other. Away from the stain that widened between us.

‘Severe tearing and scarring of the cervix,’ the doctor told Janice and me three days later as we’d prepared to leave the hospital. ‘I’m sure you know what this means.’

Janice and I had a pretty good idea what it meant, but neither of us said a word, as if by not answering we might at least keep something alive.

‘You won’t be able to have children,’ the doctor said.

As I’d helped Janice out of her seat she winced in pain. I’d held onto her arm and we’d walked out of the hospital slow and careful, like people who no longer trusted even the ground beneath them.

I smelled death soon as Billy and I struggled up the bank, its odor stronger with each step deeper into the woods. Then I saw it. There were so many buzzards it was hard to tell at first what they huddled over. Every buzzard in Oconee County seemed to have gathered, the trees black with others waiting their turn. I held a handkerchief to my face and waded in among them. I kicked off enough to see Billy had told the truth about at least one thing.

‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said.

We waded back across the river before I asked him the question that had made me think he might be lying about what was drawing the buzzards.

‘How did you get a horse with a broke leg across a river?’ I asked.

I could tell right away that question was one he hadn’t expected. His eyes locked on his right hand, the same as they’d done the day before. Looking for strength. I bet he didn’t even know he was doing it, but it was good as any lie detector machine.

‘I beat hell out of him,’ he said, but a good ten seconds passed before he thought up that lie.

Billy turned his back to me and started topping his tobacco. I just stood there a minute. Letting him know I didn’t need to rush off to look for any more suspects because we were past the suspect stage now.

When did it start to go wrong for you, Billy?
I wondered.
Are you
like me? Can you remember one thing—a harsh exchange of words, a bad
harvest, a morning when she offered her cheek instead of her lips when
you kissed her? I know when it went wrong for me, I thought, and here’s
the worst thing, Billy. I believe Janice and I would be different people now,
better people. That miscarriage wouldn’t have happened. We would have
children, and I’d be a teacher, maybe at a college. At night Janice wouldn’t
turn her back to me, Billy. Something cold wouldn’t have locked inside our
hearts if I had been one step slower or quicker to that ball carrier, if the
coach’s whistle had stopped one play a second quicker.

I left Billy in his tobacco field and walked through the woods to Mrs. Winchester’s house. I told her we’d be back that afternoon. Then I headed up the dirt road to see Daddy.

He came out of the barn when I drove up. Daddy had aged a lot the last few years, especially since Momma had died. His heart gave him trouble, and the doctor had told him he needed to slow down. He had sold most of his cattle and worked fewer acres.

But Daddy still did more than he should. He wasn’t a man who could sit on a porch all day or spend afternoons up at Roy Whitmire’s gas station playing checkers and gossiping. I knew Travis would find him one day soon face down in a field or pasture. From what the doctor said it was a miracle it hadn’t already happened.

‘Travis said you was hunting for Holland. Found him yet?’ Daddy asked.

‘No sir, not yet. But we still got some woods and river to cover this afternoon.’

‘You been upriver to see the Widow?’

‘Not yet,’

‘I reckon you’ll have to,’ Daddy said.

‘If nothing doesn’t show by late afternoon I expect so.’

‘You ain’t skittish to go up there, are you?’

‘No sir.’

‘Good, for there’s a many who are. People always have wanted to believe the worst things about her.’

‘She’s done herself no favors shutting herself up in that hollow by herself,’ I said. ‘That’s the kind of thing gets people to talking.’

‘If that suits her I see no reason for it to be anyone else’s concerning,’ Daddy said.

He looked at his watch, ‘You ate?’ ‘No sir. I was thinking you and me could go over to Salem and get a bite.’

‘No need for that,’ Daddy said. ‘Laura brought over some collards and peas the other evening. Fixed me a pone of cornbread too. We’ll warm that up.’

‘I thought you might enjoy cafe food for a change.’

‘No,’ Daddy said. ‘What I got here fits me fine.’

I knew if I went to Salem I’d be going by myself, so I went inside and sat at the kitchen table while he warmed the food. The kitchen looked like it always had in some ways—the Black Draught calendar above the stove, the metal tins of sugar and salt on the counter. But Momma’s recipe box wasn’t on that counter. There was no sifter or rolling pin out. The kitchen didn’t have the warm smell it’d had when I was growing up and Momma always seemed to have bread or a pie in the stove.

Memory took me back to a winter evening when Travis and I had walked home after hunting squirrels on Sassafras Mountain. It had started snowing, flakes big as nickels swirling down from a low, gray sky. By the time we stepped out of the woods we couldn’t see our feet, but we could see the yellow pane of light across the pasture. That glowing window was like a beacon leading us to a warm, safe place where people who loved us would always be waiting.

Maybe that’s the best blessing childhood offers, I thought as Daddy lay my plate before me, believing that things never change.

‘That’s better than any cafe food,’ Daddy said.

There had been a time I would have agreed with him. The thick, salty tang of fatback added to the collards and field peas would have made it taste all the better. Laura’s crackling cornbread would have tasted sweet and moist as cake. Now the food tasted greasy, sliding down my throat like motor oil.

‘Country food,’ Janice called it. The few times we’d come up here for Sunday dinner and a bowl of collards or plate of venison had come to her she’d smiled and said, ‘No, thank you,’ and passed the bowl or plate to the next person.

‘How’s Janice?’ Daddy asked, as he always did.

‘She’s just fine, Daddy.’

‘That’s good to hear,’ he said.

I could hear the cicadas singing in the trees as we tried to think of something else to say. Though we sat five feet apart, it seemed a lake had spread out between us, but it was something wider and harder to get across.