Southern Exposure, page 41
As Buck Henry and the two deputies walked forward, the mist rose from the ground, the cold nightbreeze meeting the hot earth, and it curled around the live oaks that lined the pathway to the church, wove in and out among the long tendrils of gray moss, some of which hung almost to the ground. The inside of the church was a grassy mall with one cement catafalque grave commemorating the founder of the church. Beyond the building, to its right, three other rectangular tombs stood in a circle like friends meeting on a streetcorner. One of the catafalques was damaged; several pieces of the top slab had fallen inside, leaving a gaping hole the size of a shoebox in the top of the tomb.
It was around this tomb that everyone had gathered. Buck Henry saw the Essex police chief and the town council president and that fellow who ran the newspaper. He saw Ricky Gibson, who had once worked on his car, and he saw the doctor and Stoney McFarland and that schoolteacher (a woman had no business out here at night). He saw some of his own men but the guys with the dogs hadn’t arrived yet; he saw one or two farmers whose names he could never place. All of these men were standing very still and they were all staring at the broken catafalque.
Then Buck Henry saw why.
Everyone looked up when they heard the sheriff approach. Now they stared at him. Quickly Buck Henry dropped to his knees beside the catafalque. And leaned over a body.
The sheriff stared at Leonard Hansen. The man’s eyes were open and there were two bullet holes in the right side of his skull. There was no need to put a finger to the pulse in his neck. Buck Henry stood up heavily. Then he squatted back down again and picked up the assault rifle that lay beside the dead man. It was cold.
The sheriff motioned to Jim Leland. The police chief stepped forward and the sheriff asked, “Who shot him?”
Jim Leland stared down at Leonard. “I’m not sure.”
“Well, the man’s rifle hasn’t been fired. We have to know what happened.”
Jim stared down at Leonard’s body again. Something glinted up at him in the moonlight. “What’s that?” He reached down and held up Leonard’s limp left hand. On it was a small diamond ring which was obviously too small; it was stuck on the knuckle of Leonard’s left pinky finger. Jim leaned back up; he had never seen Leonard wear a ring before. He walked over to Marian and said something and the two of them approached Leonard’s body again.
Marian stared down at the dead man. Jim held up Leonard’s hand and she stared at it. Then she gasped, her hands covering her mouth. “Harriet’s ring.” She dropped down beside Leonard’s body and hit the dead man’s chest over and over again. “Why did you have to kill her? Goddamn you, why?”
Jim dragged Marian away and walked her back over to where Stoney was standing. He and Stoney stared at each other for a moment. “I guess you were right all along.”
Stoney didn’t say a word, he just stared at Leonard’s body.
Jim crossed back to Buck Henry. The sheriff said, “We have to find out who shot him so we can file a report. Likely as not, it was a case of self-defense. But we have to answer for his death.”
Jim nodded but he didn’t say anything.
Buck Henry turned and faced everyone. “I have to know who shot Hansen.”
No one said a word.
“You know we can’t just leave it this way. His gun wasn’t fired so we have to explain what happened. I want whoever shot this man to raise his hand now.”
No one did.
“I know you probably didn’t mean to kill him—just to stop him. There’s nothing to worry about. But you’ve got to speak up.”
Almost imperceptibly men moved away from each other, just inches, fractions of inches, just enough space to cast sidelong looks at each other without anyone noticing, and they wondered what would happen to them if no one owned up to the shooting.
The khaki-clad sheriff sighed and shook his head. He walked back and forth in front of Leonard’s body, stopped once in a while to say something to one of his deputies. Then he addressed the other men again. “You know there are ways of finding out, ways of identifying that bullet. Ways of finding out who was carrying the rifle with the right bore. But it seems a damn shame to waste all that effort—look what this man has already cost us—when it could all be cleared up right now if one of you would just speak up and tell me what happened.”
Silence. More imperceptible movement. Now the distance between those who stood in the churchyard was large enough that shadows could get inside it. The people stood scattered like the tombstones, isolated from each other. And they did not answer.
Buck Henry finally sent one of his men back to radio for the coroner. The deputy moved past the others and was soon swallowed by the mist. Then the Ashton sheriff spoke directly to Jim, “You got any ideas?”
Jim shook his head.
The bigger man gazed down at Leonard Hansen’s body, then finally looked up at the assemblage. “I’m going to ask y’all one more time. Who shot this man?”
Silence.
“Goddamnit. Now who did this?”
After waiting for a response and getting none, Buck Henry turned around again and sighed. When he angled back toward the group, he said, more quietly, “It’s not that I blame you. You saw his gun and panicked, maybe that’s how it happened. It was self-defense, you were apprehending a known and armed killer. It’s simple,” he finished, almost pleading now. “Please. Just tell me that.”
“It’s never simple,” someone said.
“Who said that?”
The sheriff searched each face and saw that he was not going to get an answer.
Before dawn broke, Buck Henry personally felt each firearm to see if any were warm, but it was too late to tell which had been fired now. Leonard Hansen’s body was removed, the group still standing around watching. Then, finally, everyone left. But they did not go out of the church as they’d come inside its gates, nor as they’d first entered the swamps two days before. They walked singly now, not in groups, not slapping each other, not even talking. Even those who would ride back to Essex together walked alone now. They would get in the same car and ride back through the murky morning but they would not ride together. They would look at each other furtively and they would wonder. But only one of them would know. And so they would ride side by side but singly. And they would speak again but they would not talk.
Stoney dropped Marian off at her house and then drove on to Bill’s to pick up Anna. Diane Jenkins had already taken Anna home, she said, staring at Stoney at her front door. “Stoney, what happened out there?”
“Bill didn’t tell you?”
“He said somebody shot Leonard dead. That’s not what I mean. Bill is—I don’t know, distant, different. He’s asleep now.”
Stoney gave Diane Jenkins no answer. He just drove on home in the early morning light. He was so tired he left the Rover in front of the house and climbed the steep stone steps to the front porch. Then he saw it. At his own front door. Her. He was beside her bed, he was looking down … oh God there was so much blood, Jesus blood everywhere, on the headboard, on the sheets, on the cotton blanket, on her neck, her face, the floor, drops of red trailing across the rug like footprints, it was all over the room, and she was bleeding, cuts on her face, her neck, her eyes were open but Christ she didn’t see and there were torn seams in the skin along her neck and God in heaven she was dead and cut and there was this smell this smell and she was so full of blood and there was this—
Stoney grabbed his front storm door and shook it violently, holding on, trying to make the image go away. He closed his eyes. They flew back open. That was all he could see, whether his eyes were open or closed. The room. Sarah’s face. The woman of blood. God oh God he even stabbed her in the eye! I will not look at this, I won’t. He closed his eyes tight but there it was, Sarah’s face. He opened his eyes again and saw Sarah’s face on the surface of the front door. He snapped his eyes shut. Then he saw Monkey. He saw Harriet—and he beat on the door harder, almost tore it down.
When Anna found him, he looked at her in terror. Then he saw she had no blood on her. He allowed her to lead him inside, where she made him lie down on the sofa. She held his hand. He tried to talk but found he had no words, and so he just held on to her hand as she stroked the contours of his cheekbones until he fell asleep.
“Maybe we can’t trust the world anymore, Stoney,” she whispered to him once. “But I do trust you.”
He slept all day. When he woke up, he was uncertain what day it was, uncertain whether the darkness meant it really was night or not. Day and night didn’t seem to mean much anymore. He rose and went to take a shower and toweled his hair dry and shaved and then looked at himself in the mirror for a long time.
Anna was standing in the doorway when he walked back in the bedroom. He was naked except for the white towel tied around his waist and it reminded her, suddenly, of Maum Chrish’s white scarves. It made her want to cry, that white cloth. As did the strong stomach muscles running up the sides of his chest like ladders. Her eyes mirrored the ache he had seen in his own in the bathroom and for a few minutes they just gazed at each other, taking their time, knowing exactly what that ache meant.
Slowly she unbuttoned her blouse, but they didn’t speak. He watched as she peeled her clothes away and stood in front of him. He reached over and took her hand and kissed it and they talked with the pressure of their fingertips. Their touch was sometimes sad but never tentative. Then they were together almost at once, without speaking. Their passion was hot, desperate, and demanding. Over and over again they brought each other up and they could hear the cicadas outside and smell the moist earth through the window. He felt immersed in an incredibly warm sea, a tide that caught and held him, lapped at the edges of his consciousness until he began falling rapidly, spiraling into a deep tunnel where there was no sense of danger, no explanations or circumlocutions, no blood, no fear of landing against a hard and implacable surface. As he plummeted, she soared. She ascended higher and higher into spacelessness, weightlessness, where there is no consciousness, only the sure and steady hand of sensation. That sensation was given air and light, allowed to breathe, and so it divided into a thousand different levels, a hundred dimensions. She could feel the difference between them even as she winged beyond and began to splinter into space, reveling in the loss of herself. As they moved in opposite directions, they drew together even as they drew apart.
And they had waited so long. She cried out over and over again, until sudden and intense tears erupted, so thankful was she for the simple complexity of pleasure. But the next tremor came and soon she was laughing and crying at the same time and he shouted then and took so long, went so deep, even he was laughing before it was over. The floorboards beneath the bed creaked and moaned, in the kitchen Silas howled, and Stoney and Anna laughed together until they cried again.
Epilogue
A few years have passed on by now and we look pretty much like we always did. The middle of town is still a triangle that almost nobody can cross without getting damn near run down from at least six different directions. Heyward and Sumter Brownlow meet in the diner every Thursday at noon to talk about redesigning Main Street so it’ll work better. The ladies go to Venny’s Beauty Shop and get their hair snipped and blown around while they read the old copies of People and Soap Opera Digest. Boys still whizz by on BMX bicycles with stray dogs yelping behind them. The Lutheran church is presently arguing with the Baptists about who really owns that parking lot they’ve been sharing for years which now needs repaving. Bill Jenkins has enlarged the Essex Telegraph, even has two full-time reporters working for him now, one of whom does the books too. Sadie Thompkins died last year and that no-count gal she raised showed up for the funeral, to everyone’s surprise. Elsie Fenton is running the library these days and almost nobody likes that, her being so scatterbrained and usually late opening up; thank goodness the town council hired a high school girl to help her, one of Diamond’s nieces that everybody says is smart as a whip. Heyward Rutherford did finally demolish Sarah’s store but the garden club talked him out of a car wash at the last minute; retired now as town council president, Heyward apparently can’t decide what to do with the land and so people have been quietly planting different parts of it, hoping it will become a park before Heyward notices.
It still hurts to remember, though. That land is a pointed arrow shot into the heart of long-term memory. So is Harriet’s house. A new couple from Charleston (he’s to set up a drafting department at the community college in Ashboro) fell in love with the neighborhood and bought the lot. They’ve rebuilt the house much as it was before. They were even able to salvage a little of the lumber and both chimneys, only they added more bathrooms and turned the sleeping porch into something they call a “solarium.” The new owners painted the house burgundy with gray shutters—Harriet would have hated such modernity but all in all they seem to hold the place right dear. The garden isn’t much anymore, except for the hardier of Harriet’s flowers, which began to shoot back up little by little a year or so after the fire. The azaleas are short and stumpy now, regrouping, and the fifteen paintings Harriet saved that night hang on the walls of the library.
Some of us who survived that summer are also long gone. Marian, Stoney and Anna, and Jim Leland all left within a year of Leonard Hansen’s death. Marian is Dr. Davis now, heads up some kind of an experimental program in the Chicago city schools; she was invited back to speak at the graduation ceremonies of the high school last year but she didn’t stay long. Jim Leland finally did get married, of all things, and he and his new wife, who used to teach math at the high school, moved to Spartanburg and opened up a restaurant; they come back to see relatives right often. Stoney and Anna returned to Washington. Seems Anna’s pictures are doing real well; a book of them, including some photos of Harriet and of Maum Chrish’s house, was published just three months ago. Rumor is Stoney went back to school and became a history professor, but they’ve never been back to visit.
Maum Chrish just disappeared. No one has ever seen her again. After that last night, a reporter from Ashboro went out to the swamps to try to talk to her; the fellow had heard Marian say Maum Chrish told her where Leonard would be. But the old swamp woman was just gone. Marian went out there a few days later. She said everything in the shack was exactly the same. The ship model was still hanging from the rafters, the pieces of white cloth were still in the trunk. But the woman was gone. Most people assumed she’d just taken off temporarily—what with so many folks roaming around in the swamps after Leonard, and probably she’d be back when everything quieted down again. Only Marian felt differently. And she was right, nobody’s seen Maum Chrish since.
Yeah, we look right much the same. We were a quiet town and then something loud and noisy happened and now time has rowed in and rowed out again. We miss Harriet and Sarah; we don’t seem to have as many old ladies around anymore; they go to nursing homes more often now. But we’ve adjusted to our loss, and the earth has settled flat over the graves. Sometimes, at twilight, walking down Aiken Avenue under the live oaks, you can almost imagine it never happened.
Almost.
There never was an investigation into the shooting of Leonard Hansen. There was no inquest. The two bullets which had gone through Leonard’s body (one apparently missed) were never recovered, and Buck Henry wrote up the death as accidental. Someone in pursuit of Leonard Hansen had fired upon the suspect under the jurisdiction of the Ashton County Sheriff’s Office, to protect himself and to stop a known killer. Harriet Setzler’s diamond ring, as well as the Rothenbarger silverware found later in the cellar of Leonard’s house, were conclusive proof that he had killed her and Sarah. Brockhurst’s murder, on the other hand, remains an unsolved case in Ashton County; Buck Henry still believes J. T. Turner might have been responsible and once a year or so he studies the file on it again and carefully questions any burglary victims in the area.
I would like to say we’ve stopped trying to figure out who really killed Leonard. I truly would. But I can’t. Nor can I speak for anyone anymore except myself. I’m no longer the mouthpiece of this town. (At one time I practically was Essex.) But people can’t come to me anymore to find out what we’re all thinking. Our collective consciousness is gone. Which is the primary scar that summer left on us. We don’t talk much these days, not like we used to. We live only in our own pocket now. We’re not too sure of things anymore. Next time we probably won’t be as shocked, which is a way of saying we probably won’t care as much. But that summer changed us forever. Before it, as naturally as the rites of birth, circumstance sliced our fingers and joined our blood in an act of faith and loyalty. We were one, a town of shared blood. Then circumstance betrayed us and soured the blood like ruined wine. Our blood does not flow one from the other anymore: it is now a solitary river which joins no sea, an act of love forever contained and selfish.
What I’m trying to say is, we don’t know exactly who killed Leonard. I don’t even know who everyone else thinks did it. I only know who I think did it. I believe it was whoever lost the most—like idealism, the security of sanctuary, the unsullied memory of childhood.
So the Pizza Hut is moving in and the bank has added another teller and pretty soon Seth Von Hocke will be in high school. And Harriet lies where she always wanted to be—beside William. (Trying to annoy Elizabeth on the other side, no doubt.) People go by the Setzler plot often, to remember, to tell stories about Harriet to their children. Which may be how the odd thing happened. I refer to the small live oak sapling that has grown up behind the Setzler headstone. The tree is almost four feet tall now, first live oak that’s been planted around here in decades. Seth says sometimes it looks to him like old Mrs. Setzler herself is rising up out of the ground to check on what everybody’s up to.
