The Bottoms Read online

  “Yeah,” Daddy said. “He’s a good fella. His young wife ran off with a drummer, by the way. That doesn’t bother Cal any. He’s got a new girlfriend. But what he was tellin’ me was interestin’. He said this is the third murder in the area in eighteen months. He didn’t write about any of ’em in the paper, primarily because they’re messy, but also because they’ve all been colored killings, and his audience don’t care about colored killings.”

  “How does he know about them?”

  “He gets along pretty well with the colored communities here about. He said he’s got a nose for news, even if the newspaper he owns and writes isn’t one that’s worth all the news. He said all the murders have been of prostitutes. One happened in Pearl Creek. Her body was found stuffed in a big drainpipe down near the river by the sawmill. Her legs had been broken and pulled up and tied to her head and her body had been cut on. Like the one I seen today. Turned out nobody really knew this woman, though. She had sort of drifted in and got a job in one of the cribs over there.”

  “Cribs?”

  “That’s where the prostitutes work, dear. It’s a kind of house … You know?”

  “Oh. I’m certainly gettin’ an education. I didn’t know you knew all this.”

  “I find out a lot doin’ my little constablin’. Anyway, she was found and buried by some Christians wanted her to have a burial, and after a time no one thought much about it. It’s the same old story. A colored murder isn’t something the colored say much about, ’cept amongst themselves. They take care of their own when they can, ’cause the white law sure ain’t gonna do much. In this case, wasn’t no one really knew the woman and wasn’t anyone suspected. Same thing was thought then that’s thought about Jelda May Sykes. It was figured a tramp done her in, caught the train out.”

  “You said there were three.”

  “Other was found in the river. Thought to be a drown victim at first. Cal said rumor was she was cut on, but he can’t say for sure if it’s true. Might not be any kind of connection.”

  “When did these murders happen?”

  “Best I can tell, the first one was killed January of last year. The other one, I don’t know. Don’t even know if it did happen. People could have been talking about something happened years ago and Cal caught wind of it. Or whoever told him might have misheard it. Or been yarn’n him. It’s hard to tell when it comes to the colored community.”

  “Did Mr. Fields know about Jelda May Sykes?”

  “He did.”

  They were silent for a while. Through our thin walls I could hear the crickets outside, and somewhere in the bottoms, the sound of a big bullfrog bleating.

  “Jelda May’s body,” Mama asked. “What happened to it? Who took it?”

  “No one. Honey, I paid a little down payment to have her buried in the colored cemetery over there. I know we don’t have the money, but—”

  “Shush. That’s all right. You did good.”

  “I told the preacher over there I’d give him a bit more when I got it.”

  “That’s good, Jacob. That’s real good.”

  “By the way, the constable over there. You know who it is?”

  “No.”

  “Red Woodrow.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “You didn’t mention it.”

  “Didn’t see any reason to. I never thought about it much until today when I seen him. I didn’t want to mention it now—”

  “Oh, don’t be silly.”

  “—but I felt I ought to. I don’t like to hide behind something bothers me. He told me to tell you hello.”

  “He did.”

  “I didn’t plan to tell you. I don’t know why I did.”

  “Honey, you can quit being silly. You know there wasn’t nothing to any of that.”

  Their tone had changed. Had become almost formal. I wasn’t sure what was different, but something was, and it had to do with Red Woodrow.

  “He wanted me to stay out of things.”

  “It is his jurisdiction, isn’t it?”

  “Like I said, murder took place here. The only reason they have the body is I needed help from Doc Tinn.”

  “Red can be … well, testy.”

  “Wasn’t the word I had in mind for him,” Daddy said.

  “Jacob, just forget him.”

  “I want to.”

  “His shirtsleeves?” Mama asked.

  “He still keeps them rolled down.”

  They grew silent. I turned on my back and looked at the ceiling. When I closed my eyes I saw Jelda May Sykes again, ruined and swollen, fixed to that tree with barbed wire. And then she was gone, just faded away, leaving only her dark eyes, and then the dark eyes turned bright and I saw white teeth in the dark face of the horned Goat Man.

  Suddenly, I was standing in shadow in the middle of the trail looking at him. He started coming toward me.

  I ran, and I could hear him running right behind me. I was breathing hard, and he was breathing even harder, but not like he was tired. It was more the fast-paced breathing of someone planning something they would enjoy.

  The shadows from the trees grabbed at me and tried to hold me, but I broke loose. Just as the Goat Man was gaining on me, about to put his hand on my shoulder, I reached the Preacher’s Road ahead of him, and when I looked over my shoulder, he was gone. I was sitting up in bed, wide awake, staring at the wall.

  It took me a long time to fall back asleep, and in the morning I awoke exhausted, as if I had been pursued all night by the devil himself.

  8

  After a while, things drifted back to normal for Tom and me. Time is like that. Especially when you’re young. It can fix a lot of things, and what it doesn’t fix, you forget, or at least push back and only bring out at certain times, which is what I did, now and then, late at night, just before sleep claimed me.

  Daddy looked around for the killer awhile, but except for some tracks along the bank, signs of somebody scavenging around down there, he didn’t find anyone. I heard him telling Mama how he felt he was being watched when he was in the bottoms, and that he figured there was someone out there knew the woods and river well as any animal and was keeping an eye on him.

  But that’s about all he said. There was nothing about it that led me to believe he thought those tracks were actually of the Goat Man or that the tracks belonged to the murderer. They could have been anyone fishing, hunting, or just fooling around. I didn’t get the impression his sensation of being watched meant much either.

  In time Daddy no longer pursued it. I don’t think it was because he didn’t care, or that he was concerned with what Red Woodrow thought, but more like there was nothing to find, and therefore, nothing to do.

  Making a living took the lead over any kind of investigation, and my Daddy was no investigator anyway. He was just a small-town constable who mainly delivered legal summonses, and picked up dead bodies with the justice of the peace. And if the bodies were colored, he picked them up without the justice of the peace.

  So, with no real leads, in time the murder and the Goat Man moved into our past.

  The thing I was interested in was what had interested me before. Hunting and fishing and reading books loaned me by Mrs. Canerton, who was a kind of librarian, though it wasn’t anything official. There wasn’t an official library in Marvel Creek until some years later. Mrs. Canerton was just a nice widow lady that kept a lot of books and loaned them out and kept records on them to make sure you gave them back. She would even let you come to her house and sit and read. She nearly always had cookies or lemonade on hand, and she wasn’t adverse to listening to our stories or problems.

  I continued to read pulp magazines down at the barbershop and talked with Daddy and Cecil, though as usual, it was Cecil I enjoyed talking to the most. He certainly loved talking, and seemed to like my company. He was especially fond of Tom, always giving her a penny or a piece of candy, letting her sit on his knee
while he told her some kind of whopper about wild Indians, people at the center of the earth, planets where the moon was blue and men lived in trees and apes rode in boats.

  Daddy wasn’t as much fun to talk to because he always led his conversation around to telling me how I was supposed to live life and giving me lectures on this and that. I figured I knew all that and he could save his breath. I had learned the best thing to do was to just sort of look interested until he ran out of steam.

  Although the murder wasn’t on my mind much anymore, one day at home something came up about it and the talk Daddy had with Red Woodrow. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but Daddy said something about him, as if he were baiting some kind of hook, and Mama said he shouldn’t be so hard on Red, and though Daddy didn’t say anything to that, I could tell he didn’t like any kind of defense of Mr. Woodrow. I could also tell my mother regretted she had said anything.

  Daddy began working at home a lot, going into the barbershop now and then. He had left the key to Cecil, who he had come to rely on heavily.

  On this day, he had me and Tom go out and set Sally Redback to harness and plow. After a bit he came and ran the middles, had me and Tom walk behind him and pick up chunks of grass that didn’t get rolled good, turn them over, mash them with our feet so the roots would be exposed to the sun and die out.

  He brooded for an hour or so over the thing with Red Woodrow, then gradually he ceased to mope and began to whistle. Lunchtime he told me to go to the house and bring back something to eat, as he was going to continue plowing.

  Back at the house Mama packed a lard bucket with some cornbread and fried chicken, filled a fruit jar with pinto beans and put the lid on it. She put a couple bowls and some spoons with it all, jammed it in the bucket, had me go out to the well and draw up the buttermilk.

  When I brought it back she poured the buttermilk into a couple of fruit jars and screwed rings and rubber toppers on them. Out of the clear blue, I said, “Daddy don’t like Red Woodrow, does he?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mama said. “They used to be best friends.”

  I felt like I’d been poleaxed. “Best friends. You don’t mean that, do you, Mama?”

  “I do.”

  “They didn’t sound like best friends when they was talking that day over at Pearl Creek.”

  “Daddy told me they talked. I think Red felt Daddy was horning in on his business.”

  “Was he?”

  “Not really.” She dried her hands and put the two jars of buttermilk into another lard bucket. “Daddy saved Red from drowning once.”

  “They talked about that,” I said. “Daddy said how he had saved him from a suck hole.”

  “Yes. I was there. We were on a barge. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Girls weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. Be out late swimming with boys. I shouldn’t have been there.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing really. Red jumped off in the water, got in a suck hole, your Daddy jumped in and pulled him out, was nearly drowned himself. He was a strong swimmer back then.”

  “How come they don’t like one another?”

  “Me, I guess.”

  “What about you?”

  “Red was my beau, then I met your Daddy, and he became my beau. It happened on that barge trip. That was long ago. We were very young then.”

  “So he didn’t like that you liked Daddy better?”

  “That’s pretty much it. But I’ve felt bad about it some.”

  “Because you didn’t go with him?”

  “Oh, heavens no. But I hear tell all the time about how I broke his heart and it hardened him. About how he don’t like women no more. Won’t have anything to do with them. I don’t mean he’s funny or anything.”

  “Funny?”

  Mama suddenly realized what she had said and that it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with me. Back then such matters were hardly mentioned, let alone discussed. Least not within family or polite company.

  “Oh, nothing, honey. I just mean he got kind of mean-spirited about women and quit having anything to do with any of the decent ones.”

  “What about the not decent ones?”

  I knew what I was doing, but I tried to present it in an innocent way.

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Mama said, and I noticed her face had gone red. “Now you run on. Take this on out to your Daddy before the food gets cold and the buttermilk gets warm. Tom don’t like buttermilk, so let me get her some cold water.”

  I knew Tom didn’t like buttermilk. Why was she telling me that?

  Mama went out to the well with a fruit jar. I followed carrying the two lard buckets filled with food and drink. Mama dropped the bucket in the well, started winching it up.

  I said, “So Mr. Woodrow liked you, but you liked Daddy, and Daddy don’t like that you liked Mr. Woodrow, and Mr. Woodrow don’t like you didn’t like him, and now he don’t like other women?”

  “Something like that,” Mama said. “I liked Red. I just, well, it just didn’t work out between me and him.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  She pulled the bucket up on the well curb, poured from it into the jar, and put a lid on it. “Me too,” she said. “Now you run on.”

  “Mama?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why does Mr. Woodrow wear long sleeves rolled down all the time?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. Now go on.”

  I put the water jar with the buttermilk jars, went on back to the field. Daddy and Tom had parked Sally Redback at the far end near the woods under a sweet gum tree. We sat under the sweet gum and ate. I stole side glances at Daddy from time to time and tried to think of him young and pulling Red Woodrow out of the water.

  Actually, he was young when all this occurred, most likely in his thirties, but at my age he seemed ancient.

  I wondered if that day he said he wished he hadn’t saved Red Woodrow was on account of the murder and what Red Woodrow had said, or on account of Mama.

  I had never really thought much about my parents having a life before me, or having to choose each other at some point. I just took for granted they had been together forever. The fact Daddy might be jealous of Red Woodrow was strange to me. It was a side of my father I had never seen or even suspected. I began to realize why he had never really taken a shine to Cecil. Cecil flirted with Mama, and Mama kind of liked it, and Daddy didn’t.

  When the air had turned cool and the nights were crisp as a starched shirt and the moon was like a pumpkin in the sky, Tom and me played late, chasing lightning bugs and each other. Daddy had gone off on a constable duty, and Mama was in the house sewing.

  Toby had actually begun to walk again. His back wasn’t broken, but the fallen limb had caused some kind of nerve damage. He never quite got back to normal, but he could get around with a bit of stiffness, and from time to time, for no reason we could discern, his hips would go dead and he’d end up dragging his rear end. Most of the time he was all right, ran with a kind of limp, and not very fast. He was still the best squirrel dog in the county.

  On this night he was in the house, something he wasn’t supposed to be allowed to do, but when Daddy was gone Mama sometimes let him in and he would lie at her feet while she sewed.

  So it was just me and Tom, and when we were good and played out, we sat under the oak talking about this and that, and in the back of my mind I was imagining the oak to be the Great Oak where Robin and his Merry Men met in Sherwood Forest. I had read of it in one of Mrs. Canerton’s books, and it had made quite an impression.

  As we sat under the oak, talking, I had that same feeling Daddy had spoken of when he was down in the bottoms, in the deep woods, the feeling of being watched.

  I stopped listening to Tom, who was chattering on about something or another, slowly turned my head toward the woods, and there, between two trees, in the shadows, but clearly framed by the moonlight, was a horned figure, watching us.

  Tom, noticing
I wasn’t listening to her, said, “Hey.”

  “Tom,” I said. “Be quiet a moment and look where I’m lookin’.”

  “I don’t see any—” Then she went quiet, and after a moment, whispered: “It’s him … It’s the Goat Man.”

  The shape abruptly turned, crunched a stick, rustled some leaves, and was gone.

  It scared me to think the Goat Man could come as far as our house, knew where we lived, but our land was connected directly to the bottoms and we were a long way from the Preacher’s Road.

  “He must have followed us home that night,” Tom said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t like him knowing where we live.”

  “Neither do I.”

  We didn’t tell Daddy or Mama what we saw. I don’t exactly know why, but we didn’t. It was between me and Tom, and the next day we hardly mentioned it. I think mentioning it made it too real. It was one thing to have seen the Goat Man in the bottoms, but up next to our house, that was another matter.

  Besides, what would have been the point of telling Daddy? He didn’t believe in the Goat Man. You couldn’t believe in some things till you seen it or done it. Which made me think of that business about a woman’s clitoris. Was that real? Or was Doc Tinn just yarning?

  For a few days I slept with one eye open, then the urgency of it passed. That’s one of the joys of being a kid. You can build up enthusiasm fast, and you can get over something just as fast.

  A week after we saw the Goat Man the great rains came. Lightning danced along the skyline for two days, crackled and sparkled inside the cloud cover like lightning bugs caught up in a cheesecloth sack. Rain pounded the earth like Thor’s hammer, stirred the river and turned it muddy. Fishing ceased. Plowing ceased. Daddy didn’t bother trying to go into town to the barbershop at all. The roads turned to mud. The world turned wet and gray and all progress stopped.

  With the rain came the wind, and on the third day of the great rain and the tree-bending bluster came a Texas twister.

  A twister is a horrible, fascinating thing. One moment there’s a huge dark cloud, then the cloud grows a tail. The tail stretches toward the ground, and when it touches it begins to cry and howl and tear up the earth.