The Bottoms (10 page)

There wasn’t nothing to see at first, but we could hear men talking. I recognized Doc Stephenson’s voice. He sounded loud, and drunk. Just when I was getting cold feet, and thinking about climbing down, Richard put his hand on my shoulder, and into view came two colored men carrying a long, narrow, galvanized tub packed with ice and, of course, the body.

The corpse was covered with a big burlap sack, and soon as they set it down on the ice-cutting table, they removed the sack, and I got a good look.

Looking down on it, I felt strange. It was the same body I had found that night. But it had seemed ten feet tall and terrible then. Now it was small and bloated and sad-looking, and suddenly, a person. Someone’s spirit had inhabited that body and it had been alive and had eaten and laughed and had plans. Now it was a pathetic shell of wasting flesh, minus a soul. I either smelled, or imagined I could smell, the decaying odor of the body rising up with the cold from the icehouse’s interior.

In that moment, something else changed for me. I realized that a person could truly die. Daddy and Mama could die. I could die. We would all someday die. Something went hollow inside me, shifted, found a place to lie down and be still, if not entirely in comfort.

Her head was tilted back and slightly submerged in chunks of ice. The mouth was open, and missing teeth. Many of the remaining teeth were jagged or broken, and I immediately realized they had been knocked out. The woman’s breasts were split open and laid back and the blood had gone gray and was frozen.

For the first time I was seeing a woman’s privates, but there was really nothing to see. Just a triangle of darkness. The poor woman’s knees were slightly bent and she lay with her left hip down and her right hip up. Her hands were out to her sides and cupped into claws. Her face was hard to make out. Things had been done to it. There were rips in her body where the barbed wire had torn it. There were cuts all over.

Doc Stephenson, sucking from his flask, wobbled over to the body and looked down. He said, “Now that is one dead darkie.”

The colored men who had toted the body out in the galvanized
tub looked at the floor. Doc Stephenson punched the one on his right with his elbow, said, “Ain’t it, boy?”

The man lifted his chin slightly, and without looking at Doc Stephenson directly, said, “Yas suh, she sho is.”

It embarrassed me to see that colored man have to act like that. He was big and strong and could have pulled Doc Stephenson’s head off. But if he had, he would have been swinging from a limb before nightfall, and maybe his entire family, and any other colored who just happened to be in sight when the Klan came riding.

Stephenson knew that. White folks knew that. It gave them a lot of room.

I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Abraham. The look on his face had gone from boyish excitement to one I couldn’t quite identify.

Daddy moved to look at the body then, and said to Doc Stephenson, “I thought you couldn’t look at the body? Wouldn’t.”

“Not in town. Wouldn’t a white person within a hundred miles have anything to do with me they knew I was hauling a colored into my place. A decent white woman sure wouldn’t want to be examined in no place like that. No offense, boys, but colored and white need their separation. Even the Bible tells us that. Hell, you boys are happier when you don’t have the worries we do. You’re lucky, is what you are … Taylor here told me I ought to have a look. That we ought to come out and help you boys.”

Doc Taylor grinned shyly; the dampness on his teeth caught the lamplight and made them shine.

Doc Tinn had not stepped forward. He stood slightly back of Daddy and Doc Stephenson, his head down, not quite knowing what to do with his hands, though I had an idea what he’d like to do.

Doc Taylor stood at the end of the table, looking at the body calmly, taking it all in.

Doc Stephenson looked the body over, touched it, moved it slightly, said, “Looks to me a wild hog got her.”

“Then tied her with barbed wire to a tree?” Daddy said.

Doc Stephenson looked at Daddy as if he were an idiot. “I mean before she was tied to the tree.”

“You saying a hog killed her?”

“I’m saying it could be like that. They got tusks like knives. I’ve seen them do some bad things to flesh.”

“Doctor Tinn,” Daddy said. “Do you know this woman?”

Doc Tinn came forward, looked the body over. “I don’t think so. I’ve sent for the Reverend Bail, though. He’s supposed to be here already.”

“What’d you do that for?” Doc Stephenson said.

“He knows most everybody in these parts,” Doc Tinn said. “I thought he might could identify her.”

“Hell, how you tell one colored woman from another is hard for me to figure,” Doc Stephenson said. “I wouldn’t think you boys could keep up with your wives. ’Course, maybe you don’t try to.”

Stephenson laughed as if everyone were in on the joke. He had no idea he was being rude. He believed so strongly that colored and white were truly different at the core, he thought it was evident to everyone.

I could see Doc Tinn’s shoulders shaking. Doc Taylor’s expression changed slightly. He glanced at the floor briefly, then looked up again, focusing on the body.

Doc Stephenson said, “Now that I look at her better, I think a panther did it.”

“A panther ain’t any more prone to tying bodies to trees with barbed wire than a hog,” Daddy said. I saw Doc Tinn’s face change slightly. He had liked that.

“I know that,” Doc Stephenson said, and his tone was sharper than before. “What I’m suggestin’ is she was killed by a panther,
then someone else came along, some colored boys, and tied her to a tree.”

“What for?” Daddy asked.

“For fun. Why not? You was a boy once. You ever done somethin’ foolish, Constable?”

“Lots of times. But I wouldn’t have done nothing like that, and I don’t know any boys would.”

“Maybe not white boys. And listen here now, Tinn, I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I know you. You’re all right. But colored and whites is different. You know that. Down deep you do. Hell, there’s things that a colored can’t help, and I think folks are wrong to hold every little thing you coloreds do against you. Boys wouldn’t have meant nothing by it. It’d just be somethin’ to do. You know, like finding a dead fish and draggin’ it around.”

“A dead fish ain’t a woman,” Daddy said.

“Yeah, but don’t you think a couple little colored boys would have a pretty good time playin’ with a naked colored gal?”

“Doc,” Daddy said. “You been drinkin’. Why don’t you go somewhere and get sober.”

“I’m all right.”

Doc Taylor, who had been silent, said, “Doctor, maybe you have had a bit too much to drink. I ought to get you home.”

“What for,” Doc Stephenson said. “Nothin’ there.”

I had heard how his wife had up and ran off from him, and since he always seemed mean as a snake to me, I couldn’t say I blamed her.

“You could rest,” Doc Taylor said.

“I can rest fine right here, anywhere I want to.”

I saw Doc Taylor look at Daddy and shake his head, as if to indicate he was sorry.

“I don’t want you here,” Daddy said. “Go somewhere and get sober.”

“What’d you say?”

“I don’t stutter. Go somewhere and get sober.”

“You talkin’ to me like that in front of these colored boys?”

“These men haven’t been boys in years. And I’m just talkin’ to you, period.”

“This ain’t your jurisdiction no how.”

“Did I say anything about arresting you? Now get on your horse and ride.”

“I got a car.”

“It’s an expression, you jackass.”

“Jackass. You callin’ me a jackass?”

Daddy turned and moved close to Doc Stephenson. “I am. I’m callin’ you a jackass. Straight to your face. Right now. Here. Ain’t it bad enough we got a woman’s been murdered, and not by no goddamn panther neither. Ain’t that bad enough? We ain’t supposed to be quarrelin’ over her poor dead body. Get out before I put you out on the end of my shoe.”

“Well, I never …”

“Right now. Go. Taylor, get him out of here.”

Doc Taylor touched Doc Stephenson’s arm, and Stephenson jerked it away. “I don’t need no damn seein’ eye dog.”

Doc Stephenson, perhaps trying to show some defiance, took a big swig of his whiskey and wobbled off toward the door. Just before goin’ out he turned and said, “I ain’t forgettin’ you, Constable.”

“Well, I almost done forgot you, and will, quick as you go out that door.”

Doc Stephenson hesitated, then said, “I’ll just leave you then. See what you can learn from that boy. I can’t believe they even give the title Doctor to a colored. You ain’t no doctor to me, nigger. You hear me?”

“Come on,” Doc Taylor said.

“You leave me alone,” Doc Stephenson said.

And out the door he went.

I looked at Richard, then Abraham. They both had big grins
on their faces. We looked back down through the split in the roof.

“Sorry about him,” Doc Taylor said. “His wife run off from him. He ain’t got over it yet.”

“He’s not the kind that will.”

“I talked him into coming,” Doc Taylor said. “I thought he could help. And I guess I was curious.”

“I appreciate you,” Daddy said. “You better take care of him.”

It was polite, but it was clear Daddy wanted Doc Taylor out of the icehouse too.

“Yeah,” Doc Taylor said, and left.

Daddy said, “Doctor, would you like to examine and give me your opinion on the patient?”

“Yes, I would,” Dr. Tinn said.

He set his bag on the edge of the table and opened it. He said, “Billy Ray, light me up a lantern, would you?”

Billy Ray, one of the colored men who had carried the body in, lit a lantern and brought it over to the table, as it was pretty dark inside the icehouse. The only other light was light from cracks in the roof and from a few breaks in the board siding.

The lantern made the room glow orange. Doc Tinn draped the lantern handle on a hook that hung from a rafter over the table. When he did that we moved back from our place at the hole, waited, then slid our faces back. I was afraid we’d make a shadow that would cause them to look up and see us, but with chinaberry limbs hanging over us, and that cloud across the sun, there wasn’t a noticeable change. Least I wasn’t aware of one. And the bottom line was curiosity ate up caution.

Doc Tinn pulled on a pair of big rubber gloves and poked the body with his big fingers. He took off the gloves, lit a match, held it close to her mouth and looked inside. He waved the match out, slipped on the gloves again, stuck a finger down her
throat and worked it. He came up with a little something on his finger, wiped that on a cloth he took out of his bag. He stuck a finger up her nostrils, worked it around, wiped what he found on the same rag, then folded it.

He said, “I’m gonna have to cut on her to see the inside of her stomach.”

“The inside of her stomach?” Daddy said.

Doc Tinn nodded. “I ain’t maybe had the schoolin’ Doc Stephenson’s had, but I got my hunches.”

“Well,” Daddy said, “I know for a fact Doc Stephenson learned his doctor’n out of a book and he did his first doctor’n on horses and cows.”

Doc Tinn grinned. “So did I.”

Daddy grinned back, said, “Go on and do what you got to do.”

“This won’t be pretty.”

Daddy, less humored now, nodded. “I know.”

Doc Tinn took a tool from his bag, a scalpel, began cutting at the woman’s chest and down to her navel. I thought at first I was gonna lose my breakfast, but I was just too mesmerized to turn away. Doc Stephenson wasn’t entirely wrong. Boys were fascinated by a dead body, but not in the way he had suggested.

The cutting was odd in that there wasn’t any blood. She was long dead and pretty well frozen, but there was a hint of gas that rose up from the corpse and through the slit in the roof. It made me feel sick for a moment, then it passed.

I squinted when he started handling the sweet meats inside her. Finally he cut open something, reached in with his hand, took out some dark things, and put them on the table.

I turned away for a moment, saw that Richard and Abraham were still looking. I didn’t want to be thought a weak sister, so I looked again.

Doc Tinn had Daddy open the front door to let in some
more light. There were people out by the porch and Daddy had to run ’em off. They moved away reluctantly. They were looking up at us on the roof, but no one spilled the beans. I think they were glad someone was getting a look.

Doc Tinn went to work on the woman’s privates, cut, probed around down there for a while, and Daddy moved across the room with the other two men.

This went on for some time, and finally the doctor stopped, rolled the body over, looked at it, rolled it on its back again, said, “Billy Ray. Will you or Cyrus bring me a pan of water and some soap and a towel?”

Both Billy Ray and Cyrus went away. Doc Tinn pulled off his gloves and lay them on the table. He said, “Now this is just my opinion, mind you.”

“I appreciate it,” Daddy said, walking up to stand beside him. “Go on.”

“Wasn’t no wild hog nor a panther done this.”

“I never thought it was. Panthers don’t normally attack people. It could happen, but it ain’t normal.”

“Panther. Wild hog. They don’t work a body like this no how. This was a man done it.”

“I figured as much.”

“Used a real sharp knife. These cuts was made while she was alive. Mostly. But some was after. Look at her hands here.” Doc Tinn reached down and took hold of one, lifted it, turned it so Daddy could see. “There’s cuts on ’em, like she was tryin’ to fend the fellow off. Also there’s fingernail wounds. This means he did most of this while she was alive. See how she’s buried her own nails into her palms, trying to deal with the pain. There’s a stab here on her back, and a slash at the kidney area. None of these are deep, ’cept for the stab. It’s pretty deep, and it was twisted to be pulled out. I think she tried to fight him off, he had a knife, he slashed at her, she put up her hands, they got cut, she turned to run, he stabbed her in the back, then slashed
her, or maybe the other way around. She went down, and from the looks of the way she’s been used … you know, down there … she was raped. She’s all torn up, so she was forced. He got through with that, he cut on her some while she was alive. Her clitoris is missing.”