One Foot in Eden (6 page)

‘You need to see them twins,’ Daddy finally said. ‘They done growed up on us.’

‘I mean to do that, Daddy. If we don’t find Holland this afternoon I’ll try to go by there tomorrow.’

‘One of them boys carries your name, son,’ Daddy said, trying to make his tone gentle. ‘You shouldn’t have to already be up here to let him catch sight of his uncle.’

Daddy looked at his empty plate. There was nothing for me to say. Like Holland when he’d decided to get involved with another man’s wife and Billy when he’d decided to do something about it, I’d made my choice.

‘We could use some rain,’ Daddy said, trying to move us past what he’d said about my nephews. I knew he’d make small talk the rest of my visit. He would have said the same words to a stranger, and I wondered if that was what I had become to him, a stranger who had once been a son.

‘Yes sir,’ I said and drank the last of my tea.

‘You want some more?’ he asked.

‘No. I need to get back over to Billy Holcombe’s farm.’

‘You think he had something to do with Holland disappearing?’ Daddy asked.

‘I think he killed Holland.’

‘I just can’t notion Billy doing something such as that.’ I got up from the table.

‘People can disappoint you sometimes, Daddy. I reckon you know that well as anybody.’

Daddy knew what I was saying. ‘Come back when you can,’ he said.

I walked on out to the car. Daddy stood in the doorway and watched me back down the drive to the county road. As a young man he’d been a legendary hell-raiser, like Holland a man bad to drink and fight. After he’d married Momma he’d settled down, working dawn to dusk to make sure we had clothes and shoes and never went hungry. We never had, even in the leanest of times during the Depression. He’d held onto this land too, land that had been in his family for one hundred and eighty years.

He had held onto it not only for those who’d come before him but for his children and grandchildren. I knew his greatest satisfaction was being able to look in the fields and see his son and grandsons working the same land he’d worked all his life. He’d heard the talk about Carolina Power flooding the valley, but I knew he couldn’t have believed there’d be a time when Alexanders didn’t farm this land. I hoped he was dead before Carolina Power had the chance to take that belief from him.

He’d prepared Travis and me to carry on what Alexanders had done here for six generations. Daddy had been a stout, rough-looking man, a man not to be trifled with. But he’d taught us in a patient, caring way, his hand always light on our shoulders. When I went off to Clemson, he’d believed it was only for a few years, that I would come back to Jocassee.

Now he was an old man with a bad heart and a farm that would one day vanish completely as a dream. A man whose oldest son had become little more than a stranger. I stared through the windshield at his lean, craggy face like I’d watch something about to be swept away by a current, for I realized this could well be the last time I saw him alive.

Right then I decided I wouldn’t run for re-election. I’d serve out my term and then come back here and live with him. I’d farm this land until Carolina Power ran us all out and drowned these fields and creeks and the river itself. However long that was, it would give me some time to be a son and a brother again, maybe even learn how to be an uncle.

I backed out of Daddy’s driveway and headed toward Billy Holcombe’s farm, but it was like the car was driving itself. My mind was busy mapping the future.

I’d ask Janice to come with me, but I knew she wouldn’t. I’d pack up a few clothes and leave the savings and house and car. It sounded so easy, but it wouldn’t be. I would carry fifteen years of being part of another person’s life away with me as well. I wouldn’t be able to shuck a marriage the way I could a house or job.

I checked my watch. One-thirty. Janice was probably at a tea or playing bridge. She’d be wearing a hat and hose despite the weather, still playing the role of the wealthy doctor’s daughter.

‘Where’s Mrs. White Gloves?’ a town councilman had asked his wife at a Christmas party when he didn’t know we were behind him.

‘Probably still at home teaching the sheriff the proper way to unfold a napkin,’ the councilman’s wife had said.

You want to think the worst of her
, I told myself as the road curved with the river.
It’s easier than the truth—that sometimes what goes wrong
between two people is nobody’s fault.

I remembered what else the councilman had said that night, what Janice had heard as clearly as I had.

‘Thank God she and the sheriff don’t have any children. Can you imagine what kind of mother she’d be?’

‘Please don’t,’ Janice said when she stopped me from grabbing the councilman by the collar. ‘Their snippy comments don’t mean a thing.’

But the hurt in Janice’s eyes had argued otherwise.

By two o’clock, forty men had gathered in front of Billy Holcombe’s house. Besides more dynamite, Tom Watson had brought another grappling hook and some bamboo poles to poke undercuts with. I gave him five more men and sent him on his way. Leonard led the rest across the river to search the Carolina Power land.

‘Keep your noses and eyes open,’ I said as they walked away.

‘I know there’s a dead horse over there. There might could be a dead man as well.’

I turned to Bobby.

‘Anything I need to know of back in town?’ ‘Mrs. Pipkin brought over a book, said it was the one you’d asked her to get from the state library. That’s about it. It’s too hot for people to get into much meanness.’

‘I reckon so.’

I nodded toward Billy Holcombe’s house.

‘Let’s go have us a look-see.’

‘We’ve come to search,’ I told Amy Holcombe when she came to the door.

She didn’t say a word, just stepped out of our way. I went straight to the back room. I wasn’t looking for a body. I was looking for a murder scene. Bobby and I stripped the sheets off the mattress, but there was no bloodstain and none on the floor. We checked the closet and under the house. There was no bloody sheet, no fresh-packed dirt. Bobby climbed into the well and poked the bottom with a hoe handle. Then we searched the barn and shed, but we knew soon as we stepped inside there was no body in either, because in the dog days there’s no hiding the smell of death.

‘I’m about convinced that son of a bitch is off somewheres still alive and having a good laugh at us,’ Bobby said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Holland’s dead and he’s within a mile of where we’re standing.’

‘You’re sure of that?’ Bobby said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

I needed to get inside Billy’s head, a head that held a lot more smarts than I’d earlier imagined. I needed to think the way he did to figure out what had been done. That had worked in the past when I’d searched for a runaway from a chain gang or for a lost child or a whiskey still. Once you locked in on how a person saw the world, the hiding place could become no harder to find than a lightning bug on a July night. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to live Billy’s life awhile, sorry as it was, I was weary of living my own, glad to take my mind off a decision I was telling myself I’d already made.

‘Get a couple of men and go check his fields,’ I told Bobby.

‘Maybe he’s done some late planting this year.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ Bobby said. ‘I’d not thought of that.’

‘Be careful not to trample his crops,’ I said.

I sat down on a chopping block outside the woodshed and looked out over the dying beans and corn to where Billy worked. I knew the why and the how, and I pretty much knew the where. Like I’d told Bobby, that body was within a mile of where I sat. There was no way it couldn’t be. I knew the plow horse had hauled the body, because Holland was too big for Billy to carry.

Suddenly I realized something, not the answer but what would lead to the answer—the horse hadn’t broke its leg in the field but while carrying Holland’s body across the river. Its hoof had slipped on a slick rock, just like Billy had said, but that rock had been in the river. The weight on its back had done the rest.

What had happened then, Billy?
I thought.
You probably did what
you said. You beat the hell out of that horse and got it up the bank and into
the woods and then shot it. But you got Holland’s body off first. You left it
there in the river or on the bank. You came back and tied a creek rock to
the body and wedged it in an undercut or sank it deep in a pool. You didn’t
bury it in the ground, Billy. You were smart enough to know better. Your
best chance was the river, your only real chance, because water can keep
things covered up, even in a time of drought.

I checked my watch. Almost five-thirty. I’d heard the dynamite blasts off and on for the last three hours, but Tom would have let me know if something had come up. The same with Leonard. I watched the men out in the field, moving slow through the tobacco as though wading through a pond. Billy worked out there among them, doing his best to act like he didn’t even notice all the commotion around him.

‘I know the Holcombes is some kin to you,’ Mrs. Winchester had said. I didn’t want her or anyone else saying I hadn’t done everything possible to find out what had happened to Holland. So there was one other thing to be done, a visit I’d put off long as I could.

She lived a good mile upriver. My scarred lung and knee begged me to send Bobby, for it was an up-and-down mile. But I knew how superstitious Bobby was. He’d grown up in Long Creek but had kin who’d lived in this valley, including his Uncle Luke who’d been the Widow’s neighbor for a while. Bobby would know the stories about her. He’d no more make a visit to that old woman than he’d spend the night in a graveyard. No, I’d have to be the one to call on Widow Glendower.

I followed the river up past the old Chapman place to where Wolf Creek flowed into the river.

Once when Travis and I had been kids we’d fished Wolf Creek. It had been October, the time of year when brown trout swim into creeks to spawn. We’d started at the river where the creek entered and caught two trout right off, big males with hooked jaws, the spots on their sides big and bright as holly berries. Travis and I had worked our way on up the creek, dragging our heavy stringers behind us. One more pool and we’ll turn back, we kept telling each other, because we knew who lived at the head of that creek. But the fishing was too good. We’d kept on going.

Then we came to where the creek forked. Between the two forks stood Widow Glendower, like she’d been expecting Travis and me. She was dressed in her black widow’s weeds. That had made her white hair and white skin more unsettling. She couldn’t have been more than fifty, but to Travis and me she looked older than the mountains themselves. We had managed to hold onto our rods and reels, but we dropped the stringers of trout at her feet and took off down the creek, splashing and tripping and not daring to look back till we made the river. We’d never fished Wolf Creek again.

When Widow Glendower came to the cabin door she didn’t look much different than she’d looked a quarter century before when I’d last seen her.

‘You look to be an Alexander,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, but there was nothing to her knowing that. Anybody in Jocassee would recognize Alexander features.

‘You ain’t got need for a granny-woman, have you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m the high sheriff, and I’m looking for Holland Winchester. I was wondering if you’d seen him?’

‘Oh I’ve seen him,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘I seen him twenty-odd years ago when I brung him into this world.’

‘Have you seen him the last two days?’

‘No,’ she said, saying the word slow as if she was mulling my question over in her head.

‘Does he ever come up this way hunting or fishing?’

‘No. I’d recall it if I seen him doing such.’

I stepped off the porch, knowing I’d wasted my time coming here. Widow Glendower grinned at me.

‘Come back and visit any time, Sheriff,’ she said. ‘And be sure you let me know if you have need of a granny-woman.’

I was short-breathed and my knee needed a rest, but I didn’t stop walking until I reached the river. I sat down on a log where I had a good view of the bank and finally saw what I was looking for, the plant Andre Michaux had found in the valley in 1788. The Cherokee called it shee-show. Because it grew close to water, they had believed it could end a drought.

I walked over and kneeled beside the plant whose flowers looked like tiny white bells. I touched the leathery green leaves. De Soto’s secretary Rodrigo Rangel had not mentioned the flower in his writings. Neither had Bartram. Michaux had been the first European to see the plant for what it was, something rare and beautiful, submerged from the rest of the world in the valley of the lost.