Southern Exposure, page 23
Stoney climbed the steep brick steps of the library, stared at the ten-foot oak door flanked on both sides by bay windows. He opened the heavy door and slipped inside. On both sides of him were large airy rooms with twenty-foot ceilings, oak floors with burnished mahogany woodwork, heavy burgundy drapes hanging at the floor-to-ceiling casement windows. Along each wall painted white bookcases reached to the ceiling; wooden ladders stood nearby for the top shelves. Here and there by a window sat an old upholstered armchair for reading. In one of them Stoney had curled up with Man Friday and David Copperfield on rainy summer mornings. The smell of the place made his head swim. The pine wax used on the wood floors, the mildew of dusty clothbound books, the oniony new-mown grass floating through the open windows. And that eerie silence—the echo of his leather heels against the polished wood floor, the crackle of yellowed pages against a human hand, the endless columns of dizzying black ink spread out before him like a magic carpet.
He breathed in the aroma of the past and found it soothing. Anna sometimes said he yearned to be a child again and perhaps he did. The library was empty at the moment, having just opened, and he walked down the hall toward the rear of the building. At the end of the hall rose a massive curved staircase with a carved mahogany bannister. Ever since Stoney could remember, the staircase had been cordoned off with a velvet rope and a sign reading DANGER. Like every other child in Essex, he had believed something nefarious lurked at the top of those stairs. No one Stoney knew as a child had ever been up there. Some of the other boys said Harriet Setzler murdered children who talked too much in the library and then carried their bodies up there and walled them in. Others said there were caskets at the top, where the Civil War ghosts slept when the moon wasn’t full.
“You still think there are dead people up there?”
Stoney jumped. He whirled around to face Harriet Setzler. The old lady wore a tailored blue suit and held a stack of books.
“Scared you, did I? That’s what you get for sneaking around. You know, children still try to go up there.”
“What is up there?”
“Nothing. The town never had enough money to renovate the upstairs. It’s unsafe—the floors are half rotted. Like I used to tell you, you might fall through the ceiling and crack your skull open.”
“I don’t remember your saying that.”
“You probably liked the ghost story better. Not that any Lutheran should be believing in such nonsense.”
Stoney gazed up the stairs. “Looks like in all this time somebody would have fixed the floors.”
Harriet didn’t say anything for a second. “Go on up if you like. Just be careful.”
His eyes were still on the staircase. “No,” he said quietly. “Not now.”
As Harriet went in the front room to reshelve the books she carried, Stoney wondered what would happen to the library when she died; she had run it, for vitually no salary, for over twenty years. In a few moments Harriet walked back to the office at the rear of the building, and Stoney followed her. Once a kitchen, the office now contained an antiquated card catalog and racks of magazines and several oak reading tables, as well as the rolltop desk Harriet used to organize all library business.
“I hear that Columbia detective is talking to everybody in town,” she said, standing behind her desk staring at the circulation card in the back of a frail copy of Jane Eyre. “He seems like a competent man.”
Suddenly Stoney was tired of talking about Sarah Roth’s murder. “I’m sure he is.”
“You still suspicious of Leonard Hansen?”
Stoney looked up abruptly. Actually he hadn’t thought much about Leonard in the last few days. Maybe he just couldn’t stand the guy and was grasping at straws like Anna said. Nobody else suspected him.
“Will that detective be talking to him too?” Harriet Setzler’s face was still glued to a book.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I’m just curious. He’s talking to all the rest of us.”
“And you think he ought to talk to Leonard? Did you tell Brockhurst that?” A pause. Then Stoney asked, “Mrs. Setzler, do you know something about Leonard?”
Harriet thought about promises. Her voice was vague and innocent. “Whatever do you mean?”
Stoney marched toward the elderly woman. “Maybe Anna’s right. If anybody in this town ever told the truth, just once, maybe we’d know who did this. I’d think you—of all people—wouldn’t hide behind convention or fear of public disapproval.”
Across the desk Harriet Setzler stared levelly at Stoney. She was red in the face, but she also respected Stoney for doing exactly what she would do in the same circumstances. She took a deep breath. “I don’t have any proof, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Can’t get what out of your mind?”
Harriet closed her eyes, begged forgiveness for the small lie. At least it wasn’t a broken promise. “A few weeks before Sarah was killed, I saw the Hansen boy—late one night—just standing in front of Sarah’s house. It was real late. He was watching the house.”
Stoney leaned toward the older woman. “Mrs. Setzler, are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
The Low Country of South Carolina is a land where earth is just barely holding its own against water. Beaches overburdened by the development of the New South erode and are shorn up again with long armies of granite boulders; swamps are drained and then filled in to become farmland, only to flood once more. Near every river bogs form, mysterious and implacable pockets of muck and slime, and along the coastal shoreline, marshes thick with reeds and grasses eat into the pie-shaped wedge of hard firmament. Small rivers lead to larger rivers which drain off into sounds, and through these, small ligaments of earth are continually washed out to sea.
A swamp and a marsh are not the same thing. Marshes lie along the coast with the ease and indolence of sunbathers. They are open expanses, home to sawgrass and sedge and cattail, where only working boats in search of oyster and shrimp break the horizon. A marsh lets a human breathe, look outward, plan ahead, see into the distance. It has nothing of the crowding, the thick incestuous entanglement of a swamp. The swamp quivers with the weight of trees and darkness and secrets. Cypress and tupelo, black gum and juniper and palmetto, live oak in its tattered shawl of Spanish moss. Vines that encircle a tree again and again until they disappear into the black caul of water like limbs sucked up by quicksand. Alligators, mosquitoes grown fat and mean, crumbling tombstones of those bought and sold like cattle. And absolute crystal silence, its edge as sharp as cut glass. Always inwardness, the omnipresent danger of seeing down too far.
These breed in swamps.
Literally, the Coosawhatchie Swamp near Essex was a freshwater square ten miles across made up of the spongy land situated between the Coosawhatchie and the Salkhatchie rivers, small waterways that paralleled each other and drained off into Laurel Bay and St. Helena Sound on either side of the town of Beaufort, miles away. The end of the swamp nearest Essex, more inland, looked much as it had in colonial days, a remote prehensile world of water. This was Indian country once, home to dozens of small tribes with names like Chickasaw and Yemassee, whose history the victorious Englishmen of the Indian Wars did not see fit to preserve. Today only the rivers and towns bear the names of the native Americans of the Low Country, who used marsh grass and palmetto leaves to thatch their huts and who traced their lineage through their women. After the demise of the rice plantations a century later, scattered groups of black people—many freed slaves—replaced the Indians along the Coosawhatchie. Their descendants, including a small girl in an ill-fitting pink dress whom Marian once passed on the swamp road, frequently turn up arrowheads and clay pipes in the soaked earth where they eke out an existence bleaker than any red man ever knew.
Today, when Anna stopped along the swamp road where she’d parked before, Marian suggested they go on down a little farther, where the road had more shoulder. Anna was so glad for Marian’s company it didn’t even occur to her to wonder how the other woman knew the swamps so well. Safely parked, they had to backtrack slightly and recross a concrete bridge where the road spanned the river. While they were on the bridge, a mammoth flatbed truck suddenly roared onto it and they were pinned along the railing on the other side of the truck. Massive tree trunks, severed and on the way to market, whizzed past on the truck and the bridge trembled under their weight. Instinctively Marian reached out and threw her arm in front of Anna, like a mother protecting a child. When the truck disappeared down the road, the black woman walked to the end of the bridge and took a dirt path Anna had never noticed before. They followed it for several hundred yards. Even though only Anna knew where they were headed, in here, Marian seemed in charge. Several times Marian turned to look behind her. At first Anna thought Marian was checking to make sure she wasn’t lagging behind but then she saw that Marian was actually checking behind both of them, as though she expected someone else to be following. In a few minutes they came to a small inlet; mosquitoes hovered over the water, buzzing and skittering. As the women quickly skirted the inlet, Anna recognized where they were. It was near here that she scraped her arm the night of the town meeting. She saw the tree limb, still dangling by a slender sliver of bark. Below the damaged limb a small circle had been drawn in the damp dirt and a candle stood in its center.
Marian saw it too. “Sacred ground,” she said. “Human blood fell there, I bet.”
Shivering, Anna repositioned her camera bag on her shoulder and stared at the other woman. “How do you know that?”
“I just do.” Why did this place remind her so much of her mother? Marian closed her eyes for a moment, thought about all those old circles in the dirt yard in town. When she would fall and cut herself, her mother would draw a ring around the spot. To preserve where her blood had gone back to the earth. Later Lonnie would plant flowers around the spot, to mark it for good.
A bird squawked nearby and Marian jumped. She always expected someone to be here.
Anna was staring at her curiously when Marian asked, “Which way to her house?”
They walked on through the woods, Anna in the lead now. Nervously she kept her eyes on the ground, ever mindful of snakes. It was going to be all right today, she told herself; there were no drums, no sign of anyone else. She told Marian in whispers about her other camera being stolen the last time. “I should have told you before. I guess I was afraid you wouldn’t come along. I don’t think I had the guts to come back by myself.”
“Thanks a lot. Now if the bogeyman gets you, he’ll get both of us, right?”
At the clearing they hesitated. Marian was nervous too—just being in the swamps could do that. She looked at the tall cypress trees and she could feel their vines snaking up inside her body, winding around her internal organs, choking the life from her lips. She wished she’d stayed home, left well enough alone.
Finally Anna approached Maum Chrish’s cabin and called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”
Silence. Anna turned back and looked at Marian; then Anna squared her shoulders and brazenly climbed the rickety stairs. Marian watched, admiring her chutzpah.
“Maum Chrish?” Anna called again. “Could I talk to you for a minute?”
But Maum Chrish was nowhere to be found. Anna and Marian strolled around the yard, took in the smoldering fire, walked around the garden and the adorned live oaks, looked into the woods on both sides of the house. Finally Anna unpacked her camera gear and took some shots of the yard and the outside of the house. Marian wandered around idly, unaware that some of the photographs were actually of her.
Then Anna asked, “Want to see inside? She leaves the door open. Come on.”
Anna was on the porch before Marian could respond. There Anna grew more cautious. She poked her head inside the door, then withdrew again. “It’s okay. Nobody’s here.”
Curious, Marian joined Anna on the porch and followed her inside the cabin. She gazed in awe at the interior, the decorated poteau-mitan with its carved triangle, the drawings on the walls, the vèvè design outlined on the floor with chalk. If her knowledge of voudou was right, a ceremony had recently taken place. Otherwise the vèvè would have been erased. While Anna shot more film, Marian walked around the room. She stopped at the Sephiroth drawing. For a moment she studied it. This had nothing to do with voudou. Some of the words were Hebrew. My God, was it true? Had some fanatics out here killed Sarah Roth?
Anna was shooting pictures of the interior of the room, of the objects on the table. She didn’t notice that one of the knives was missing since Lou Brockhurst’s visit, but the sight of them rattled her again. Several times she took various shots of Marian against the decorated walls. By now Marian realized Anna was photographing her and she wondered, in a brief homage to her mother, whether shards of her soul would be left behind on the floor of Maum Chrish’s house when they left. Marian paid little attention to Anna; instead, she inspected the room, more and more mystified by the conflicting symbols she kept noticing. She half suspected she and Anna might be in real danger, invading the sanctity of what amounted to a cult temple. Several times she caught Anna’s eyes and knew Anna was wondering the same thing. Once they both stopped in front of the sexual drawing. It was so explicit that both women immediately looked down.
“Now there’s a woman who knows what she wants,” Marian said at last, lightly.
Anna laughed. Was Marian always so at ease about sex?
Marian crossed to look at the bottles and jars on the other side of the room. “What’s in there?” she asked, nodding at the rear doorway.
“Sort of a bedroom.”
The black woman entered the adjoining room. Maum Chrish, she saw, lived simply, meagerly. Almost a reverence about her simplicity, very Thoreauvian. Neat, clean. Not the hallmark of a crazy person at all. Today the swamp woman seemed less and less the primitive throwback to the Dark Ages. Her life here looked like a deliberate choice. Maum Chrish lived whatever it was she believed, which was more than you could say for most people. Did she also kill Sarah?
Beside the rope bed was a tattered Bible. Jewish words, voudou, now a Bible? Marian walked over and picked the book up. A place was marked in Genesis with a long string, a stone dangling from it. Absently Marian palmed the worn stone, glanced at it. She gazed at it several moments. Then, abruptly, she held it up, looked at it closer. Granite. A vein through it. Dark. Turn it one way and it almost looks like a …
Marian ran into the other room, grabbed Anna by the arm, and held the rock up. “Have you ever seen this before?”
Anna shook her head. “What is it?”
“Have you ever seen her wear it?”
“Marian, I’ve only seen her here once. And she was naked.”
“Naked?” Marian said the word like she didn’t know what it meant. Then, “Did she have a birthmark on the top of her left thigh?”
“Why?”
“Did she?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see her that well.”
Marian held the rock up, as though to get more light on it. Her hand shook violently and she babbled to herself aloud, “Could it be the same rock? All this time, right here. Out here? And no one told me? Do they know?”
“Marian, what is it?”
They left abruptly, at Marian’s insistence. The black woman did not say a word all the way home.
When Lou Brockhurst told Jim Leland he wanted to question Leonard Hansen, the Essex police chief immediately objected. “That’s crazy. Leonard even came and offered to help me after Sarah was killed.”
“Which would make a great cover.”
Later the two men drove out to the country in the detective’s state-owned midsize Chrysler. They turned off the Charleston highway onto a dirt road, passed endless acres of tall corn stalks, then rows of soybeans nesting in the sandy soil baked an impotent beige by the rainless summer. Once in a while an old house or a trailer appeared, set back from the road amid a graveyard of rusted automobile parts and odd pieces of battered furniture, including an ancient green sofa whose yellowed innards poked out like an exploded Thanksgiving turkey. Some farmland outside Essex had been overtaken by weeds and brambles, the fences down in more places than they were up, and now and then the two men spotted an abandoned church or a collapsed barn, one of which still had a huge red tin COKE sign attached to its side.
“What did Stoney say again?” Jim asked. “Mrs. Setzler saw Leonard outside Sarah’s house several nights before she was killed?”
Brockhurst nodded, carefully negotiating the deep ruts in the unpaved road.
“But what does that prove? How come Mrs. Setzler didn’t say anything before?”
“Hansen a friend of yours?”
Jim looked out the window beside him. “Not exactly. But I don’t have it in for him like Stoney does. Those two got into a real row once when they were kids. If you want my opinion, Stoney McFarland has lost his good sense over all this.”
Lou Brockhurst drove on. He wondered if Jim Leland, a slight man who clearly avoided confrontations, might be the tiniest bit afraid of the man they were going to see. “Well, it won’t hurt to talk to him.”
“I thought you were pretty sold on Turner,” Jim said.
“I’m sold on nothing until I’ve got proof in my hands.” Brockhurst turned to Jim. “I don’t want to mention what McFarland said, I don’t want to tip Hansen off until I get a chance to talk to some other people, see if anyone else saw him near Sarah Rothenbarger’s house anytime.”
Jim nodded and they pulled up in front of Leonard’s house. It was a frame structure, a one-story cube, with a front porch that spanned its entire front width. The foundation was mountain stone and there was a basement which no doubt had once also functioned as a root cellar. The lapboard siding was newly painted and gleamed white under the broiling sun; the pitched roof was also covered with new asphalt shingles. But the chimney leaned precariously and several of the top bricks were missing or loose, and two window frames in the front wall were rotted. Approaching the building, Brockhurst noticed that the eaves were also rotting; three small holes admitted air into the bloodstream of the house. Part of the old guttering, rusted and bent, lay on the ground nearby but no new system was yet in place. This was clearly a house in which the renovation was, almost grudgingly, slow and untidy.
