Holy city, p.3
Holy City, page 3
“I tell you, Mr. Mills, ain’t always evidence the most important thing. There’s what you can’t see. There’s what you believe. Your faith in the law because of the justice it represents.”
“Can’t operate by belief in this line of work. That may work in a nice white chapel.” He held his hand up as if swearing an oath. “Now I believe in God; I was raised a God-fearing Christian. Belief has its place, but you gotta balance faith with a healthy doubt. Otherwise, you float away.”
“So you doubting Zeke, a man ain’t never hurt no one ’cept when drunk and attacked first.”
“Anyone is capable of anything, Mrs. Hathom. Worrisome as it is to admit it.”
She was going to object, but then she looked at Will.
“I guess that is true,” she said. She faced the sheriff again. “When I come back later, I expect to see him.”
She turned and marched out the door heavily, as if carrying a great unseen but physical burden.
“Deputy,” Mills said.
Will followed Sheriff Mills back into his office and sat down and watched Ferriday Pace sitting there, pretty but disheveled, clutching the baby to her, looking out of her lightly freckled face with huge, fathomless shadow-eyes through a stray lock of strawberry-blond hair she’d teased into loose curls. She looked, in a way, like a child. Having lived away for years, Will had seen her only a couple of times and at a distance, at the supermarket or across a parking lot, but something about her was familiar to him, caught his eye. He’d met Tom two, three weeks ago and been struck hard with a sadness he expected was due to something at home. Maybe it was just the area: Euphoria County seemed for most of its residents to tighten like a vise, and you were either crushed or pushed out under the pressure and set out for life somewhere else. Back in high school, Tom was going places. Now, with some puzzlement, Will wondered how he had settled for the woman in front of him, noticing all the while an intense and luckless sorrow similar to Tom’s. She was twenty-eight, younger than Tom by three years, but something about her emitted age and hardship. She had a bruise on her cheek that had been covered with makeup. There was a quality of dressed-up shame about her. She put herself together like a little girl who can make cheap clashing materials shine by sheer willpower. Her fingernails had been painted a glittering purple at the Vietnamese salon where she worked, her V-neck shirt hung low, and her jean shorts were cut so short the front pockets poked out from under the frayed edge, revealing her lightly tanned but pale freckled skin. Her forearm and ankle displayed tattoos, already greened with age.
Sheriff Mills began, “We just want to ask you some questions. We are not interrogating you. You understand you have the right to speak with an attorney if you so wish?”
“I’m a mama now. I ain’t got nothing to hide.”
The absurdity of her statement caused Mills to pause his gum-chewing for a moment. She spoke like a country girl, neither white nor Black but raceless, and had a kind of self-consciousness Will had rarely seen but took as a sign that she had experienced a great deal.
Sheriff Mills said, “When was the last time you saw Tom?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“Tuesday, July nineteenth,” he said, jotting it down. “And where were you last night?”
“I was out of town,” she said with an upturned intonation, seeming shy or embarrassed, making that statement into something resembling a question, as if awaiting approval. It seemed she was about to cry again. She covered her face and wiped it with her hands. Sheriff Mills adjusted himself.
“Where? Why? Help us fill in some blanks.”
“I don’t want to say,” she said.
“It’d look better if you did. Your beau was murdered.”
She stopped bouncing the baby, closed her eyes as if in prayer. “I thought it was a fire.”
“We found some evidence that suggests otherwise. Please. Tell us what you know, who might have done this, where you were, so that we can help you.”
She sighed, looked at Mills, and patted the baby on her back, readjusting a cloth on her own shoulder. From out of her purse, one-handed, she brought her wallet and produced a folded paper and handed it to Will as if passing a note in class, all the while watching the sheriff.
“Well?” Sheriff Mills said.
“A receipt for a motel,” Will said. “The Rebel Inn.”
“What were you doing there?”
“I went back home to see my people.”
“What people?” Mills said.
“Out there to Sassafras Ridge. Granny, I call her. She’s not blood, but I call her Granny.”
Mills seemed to smile to himself. “You mean that old palm reader in the Snakefoot?”
“That’s why I don’t want to say,” she said. “You just gonna laugh.”
“What’d you see her about?”
“I visit her sometimes.”
“Why stay the night out that way? Shoot, can’t take you an hour to get back.”
“I got tired. The baby was needing to feed. I can park at a motel if I want to.”
“Were you and Tom having problems?”
“No, sir. I just got tired is all.”
“Did you let Tom know at any point that you were going to be away?”
“I sent him a message, I think. I can’t remember. The baby was crying, and I had to feed her and put her down. I knew he’d be playing cards out at Arnie’s Lounge, losing all his money, not that it matters now.”
The baby was crying now and piped up shrill. Day then looked up at the sheriff as if she were asking something only he could understand.
“Excuse me, sirs. She could use some feeding now,” she said, two tear streaks on her face and a tremor in her voice.
She reached up to adjust her bra, and the men stood gravely in unison, walked to the door.
Mills said, “We’ll just be outside.”
At the threshold, Will turned back. She was already watching him.
“Did you go home at all between the time you left and when we saw you this morning?”
“No, sir. I was gone all night, until I came back to the house and found y’all there, my house all aflame”—her voice began to shake—“my man dead and gone.”
“Deputy,” Mills said, and they shut the door and walked out to Will’s desk in the main office, over by the old radiator against the windows, the shades closed. Will moved a stack of files aside. Tania went about her work across the room.
They paused awkwardly, as if holding their breath.
Will said, “You know Zeke didn’t do it.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I know the man.”
“That’s not good enough. We have to wait for the results. You know that.”
“I know it looks bad for him. But there’s got to be more to the story.”
“You can’t assume that. You been sheriff’s deputy over a year. You know better than to cloud the facts with bias.”
“Yessir, I know.”
“What were you doing out there anyway, calling in a fire out in goddamn Turkey Creek?”
“I was just out; fell asleep out there.”
Sheriff Mills chuckled to himself, shaking his head. “You’re living hard, it seems. Guilty conscience? Bad dreams?”
“There a law against insomnia?”
“You keep in mind that someone less considerate would make a point of finding out how come you were out there, on that side of town, why you’ve been looking through all these criminal files, like you’re trying to memorize something. Oh yeah, don’t think I don’t notice.”
He stared at Will. The wet sound of his chewing and breathing and thinking. It seemed he wanted to say more but shook his head like this was a great pity and Will hadn’t caught on as to why.
“You got baggage, son,” the sheriff said finally. “But you handled yourself real good out there today. You may have got us the evidence we need. Call up that motel and confirm Miss Pace was there, and let me know what you find out.”
Mills surveyed the room, remembering some of the changes he’d seen, his days as a deputy, the way it all used to be, back when his daddy was sheriff. Southside could be rough, and this job brought you in touch with the thresholds of good and evil. But back then, investigating led you somewhere if you put in the work. Now, it seemed the harder you looked, the worse you got lost. He saw in Will Seems something he’d been missing in his department for years. He was an old soul, one of them. He’d do all right. If he could just pace himself, learn how to work on the team.
“That Mrs. Hathom was right about one thing,” Mills said. “You’re a lot like your daddy.”
“He ran away,” Will said. “I came back.”
“Yes, you did. And I’m wondering if that’s got something to do with why you can’t sleep in your own house. Now hold on. I’m going to need a report on my desk first thing tomorrow morning.”
Will got up. “Yessir.”
“You look like you got somewhere else to be.”
“I thought we were finishing up.”
“Not by a long shot.”
Will cleared his throat. “Sir, Silas and Buddy are out at the crime scene, and Troy has the evidence. Could I take the afternoon?”
The sheriff looked at the ground. “I’m gonna forget you asked that. We need to talk to Zeke, search the Hathom house, find anybody who saw Tom last night for questioning, you need to write that report, and right now, I need you to go over to Mrs. Claudette Janders’s house and give her the news.”
“Sir?”
“Rumor will be spreading fast,” he said. “She has a right to learn from us about Tom’s death. And see if she’d be willing to take in Miss Pace for the next little while as all this gets resolved. When you get back, we’ll start in on the other stuff.”
Sheriff Mills whistled something, stretched, and stood up. “Tania, darlin’. Get Will that address.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. Mills turned for his office, knocked, went in.
“Congratulations,” Tania said as Will approached her desk. “For getting Tom out I mean.”
“I wish I hadn’t been there.”
“I know,” she said, a look of pity on her face. “You just got to remember, you didn’t put Zeke there. You did what you had to do.”
She looked up from her desk, and it hit him, as it sometimes did, and he looked away. Tania had grown up in the county one year behind Will. She’d gone to community college and student-taught before attending the academy but was still, after a couple of years working for the sheriff’s department, working dispatch, organizing files, even getting lunches. Will felt some guilt about having been hired after Mr. Grady had quit, when the obvious decision would have been to put Tania in the field.
She cleared her voice. “You ready? Need a pen and paper?”
“You can tell me,” Will said.
“Fifty-two Walker Court Road,” she said.
“Fifty-two Walker Court Road.”
Will stepped out, glad to be away from the office. He put on his hat and looked out over the town. He could see the back of the statue commemorating Confederate veterans—stalwart and dark as a shadow under the shade of two magnolia trees in front of the white-columned courthouse of Dawn, Virginia—and out into the baking sun and the pale cracked sidewalks. There was barely anyone on the road, even approaching the lunch hour. Fifty-two Walker Court Road. He began walking toward it, thinking the exercise would do him good, but was sweating through his undershirt by the time he reached the road adjacent. It was met by two streets on either end of the lawn and paralleled by another, forming an absurdly grand yet brief town square, vacant except for the starved library (open but always empty), the pharmacy, and Antoinette’s Restaurant. This was the town he’d held in his dreams those years he’d been in exile. All this had shaped his understanding of the world. It all started here, and coming back had been like digging out the dirt pinning a coffin in the ground. He remembered growing up here with a vividness he didn’t even have for this morning. He remembered going into town and seeing it because there was nothing to do, driving the farm-use pickup too young and getting groceries at the Texaco or Gulf and nobody caring, the slackness of time he used to feel as a kid, the bright white innocent wasting of it, as if it would always be there like a great comfort, the way you take for granted mountains or land of any kind, the feeling that the world somehow made sense if you just let it spin. He used to lie in his bed in Richmond, close his eyes, and see it: home—the living piedmont swamps and the ugly scalps of new pine growth after brushfires and logging; the sounds of wild quail warbling at the edges of fields in the exploding thickets; the vague impressions of life on a series of roads all looking the same; the austere plantation silhouettes alone in their worlds of flowing red horizons, tobacco barns, and smokehouses; that heavy resinous fragrance of tobacco, like sweet, profound raisins; the cotton in the flats to the east poking out like warm soft stars. He’d attempted to bring back a past innocent and familiar but found himself a stranger to the present, ever guilty. Had leaving Richmond been a mistake? Had he been running away, lying to himself and his father when he claimed he’d come back to make things right, to face things instead? Euphoria County seemed at times to be a tangent, like an unmaintained road going nowhere. Many of the neglected houses were inhabited by vagrants and users, those who lived tobacco’s tragic legacy, and the shops on the square had mostly given way to a similar vacancy. And so the place that had for so long haunted him now appeared itself to be haunted. And here he was again, riding tall pine-lined two-lanes through the boonies, cresting into hamlets like mistakes, listening to that angry word of God since there was nothing else.
He walked on. A Ford rumbled past—a truck he’d probably seen before but didn’t recognize now that he was half foreigner—a long antenna wagging like a fishing pole from the top of the cab, arms hanging out of the driver’s window and the passenger’s, one Black and one white. Two hounds roamed the bed, sniffing the air and sliding when the truck sped or slowed. A solitary finger raised up from a tired arm slumped over the wheel, as if triggered by an uncomfortable reflex, as the truck passed through the stop sign, and Will waved back, smelling the ragged smoke floating out of a cigarette rolled with flue-cured tobacco.
He trudged on to Walker Court Road and realized he had not thought anything about how to deliver his message. This was a first for him. This whole day had been a day of firsts.
He passed old houses with little yards. One cluttered home rotting and virtually paintless, trash bags over windows, had two sedans parked on the lawn, one jacked up, both adorned with custom paint jobs and immaculate chrome rims. Nearing the little yellow house where Tom Janders had moved his mother a couple of years ago, he could see people gathered there on the porch. The street ended in a sandy track, and it was backed by the tall old woods that had not been developed yet and probably never would be since over the years anyone who could find a life elsewhere left. Will took a deep breath. He paused, uncertain he should continue, but he reasoned that he owed it to Tom and pressed on. But instead of the prayer he’d been trying to work toward, he heard a deep, hoarse voice from that strange and awful realm: “You don’t belong here.”
THE SKY HAD BEGUN to fill in with a relief of clouds, and a little wind started up. Their faces turned, and Will could see they already knew. He was merely to be the voice, the face to associate with the news. Their eyes were hard, with generations of anger welling in them. They opened out like dark water, and he could see her there at the end of this procession, a woman crowned by grief. He hoped for some tenderness and welcome but saw that she was not going to supply it.
“Young Seems,” Claudette Janders said.
All the folks in town, white or Black, called him “son” or “young man,” treating him as if he had returned the same age he had left, as if, stunted in his exile, he had to somehow catch up or fall behind. What did it take to earn respect, to be a man in one’s home, where other men’s tall legacies lay like vehicles discarded in a field? The white men met up for coffee and breakfast at the gas station. He could barely look at Mama Jay—mother it seemed to the entire county—who served up a simple country breakfast of scrambled eggs, greasy crispy bacon, biscuits and gravy, fried apples, grits, and fried fruit pies. She sold road maps and gas station T-shirts customized on Hanes blanks, reading “Mama Jay’s Get ’N’ Go,” along with a variety of spicy pork rinds, red pickled eggs and wienies and pigs’ feet, newspapers and lock-blades, a samurai sword, made-in-China Confederate flags. These men who had stayed in town on family tobacco money or quiet law practices met in the morning, former high school jocks wearing loafers, khakis, and polo shirts, sunglasses hanging from straps around their necks. They fished and hunted deer and turkey and what quail there still were and mounted what they killed in their houses and offices, had put on a comfortable weight since high school after marrying their ornamental prom dates—who’d remained beautiful and aged easily and gracefully, as sedentary as catfish, as trees—and Sheriff Mills somehow was one of them, though he stood apart as a celibate, monk-like figure, married, it seemed, only to the law. Will Seems had known all along he couldn’t be a part of their fellowship, which required both feet to be firmly set in this world of Euphoria County, of Southside, Virginia. Anyone with outside perspective was suspicious, and he’d been gone ten years. These were the men he used to see at the old deer camp, the men and their sons filling the bunks in the old cinderblock hut, men who boasted of their woodsmanship and ability to kill, and then on the way home tossed empty beer cans or trash out of their pickups.
“Mrs. Janders,” he said. “I have some bad news. Tom is dead.”
He heard it himself, how his own grief had clipped his words into a directness that sounded tactless and harsh. He felt as if he’d jumped into a creek from a tree but had not yet hit the water.
