Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller (13 page)

  When we all had a seat, Daddy asked Snake where Frank was.

  “He went fishin’,” Snake answered, “I don’t know when he’ll be back. Sometimes if they’re a-bitin’ purty good, he don’t git home ’til after dark.”

  Daddy nodded his head, “Okay, then. We’ll just have to tell him what I’m about to tell you when he gets here, then.” Daddy cleared his throat and started rubbing his chin, “Snake, do you remember what we talk about in Sunday School and church about how pretty and wonderful Heaven is? How once we get there we all get brand new bodies and nobody ever has any pain ever again? And we get to live there forever, with Jesus. The happiest thing you can remember in your life is not even close to how happy you are all the time in Heaven. And it never, ever has an end to it.”                                   Daddy paused for a minute, making sure Snake was grasping every word. “Well Snake, your momma decided she needed to go ahead and be with your daddy. She was just missin’ him too much and she knew you and Frank would be just fine. She knew that one day you’d all be together again, anyway, and once you were, you’d never have to be apart from one another again. Not ever. We’re all gonna live in that beautiful, wonderful place forever. And the best thing, is that new body she has. It’s not twisted up like the one layin’ in yonder in that bed. She don’t hurt one little bit anymore, either. And she never will again.”

  Snake started trembling, looking like he was trying hard to hold back tears. “Mr. George, I know she’s with Daddy and she’s real happy now. But do you think Jesus would git mad at me if I cried anyway? I shore did love her and I’m gonna miss her ‘til I git up there with her.”

  “No, son. Jesus won’t get mad at you one bit if you cry. He’s
glad
you loved your momma. That’s what you’re supposed to do. He expects you to cry, because he knows how
much
you loved her. Why, Jesus even cried himself one time when one of his friends died. It’s right there in the Bible.”

  Daddy looked over to where I was sitting and saw tears rolling down my cheeks. There was no way I could stop them. He looked back at Snake and pointed to me, “I guess it’s okay if we all cry.”

*****

  Daniel Delaney was the coroner for Putnam County and owned the funeral home in Fort Kane. We had taken Snake and Frank home with us before Mr. Delaney arrived at the house to examine Annie’s body. The state of Alabama required an autopsy be performed any time a coroner had any suspicion that a death was caused by any means other than natural causes or an obvious accident. It took Mr. Delaney less than five minutes to determine what killed Annie Williams. Hugh had always kept her pain medication out of her reach and given her one before he left in the morning and laid out another for her to take during the day if she needed it. And she always needed it. Then he would give her one before they went to bed. Snake had been giving her the medication and didn’t know to put it away out of her reach. Nobody thought to tell him either, because no one ever suspected Annie of taking her own life.      I guess with Hugh gone, she figured we would help watch over the boys and keep them fed. She probably felt that she was just a burden to them and the whole world, since she couldn’t do anything for herself. When you add to all that the fact she was in constant pain, that lately her medication was barely even taking the edge off, she just decided when she got the chance she’d get out of everyone’s way.

  Mr. Delaney, with Sheriff White’s blessing, ruled the death natural causes.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It was getting late, but we were having a banner night and none of us wanted to quit. Glenn didn’t put up any fuss at all when I told him I wanted to bring Snake along coon hunting with us. He felt as sorry for him as I did, and we had started including him in a lot of our activities, especially the ones that didn’t require being particularly quiet. We had caught four big coons and the dogs were really in rare form, but we knew we needed to be going. After we got the dogs loaded in the truck, we let the coons go. We always did. It was the thrill of the hunt and listening to the dogs run that we liked. We could have cared less about the coons.

  Old Roscoe let us drive the truck every time we went hunting, now. We were about to fire up the engine and go, when we saw a pair of headlights out on Highway 11 pull off the road. We were parked on a little side road that turned off the Portersville Gap, maybe a quarter of a mile from where the gap road intersected with Highway 11. On a whim, we decided not to start the truck or turn on the lights, but just sit there a minute and see if they had just pulled off for a minute or if they were up to something else.

  After a few minutes Glenn said, “Maybe we better go over there and check on ‘em. They may be havin’ car trouble.”

  “What do you think, Snake?” I asked him. I had gotten to where I ask Snake’s opinion on things, letting him believe his opinion mattered. Which it did. I found that Snake was smarter than people had always given him credit for being, including me.

  “I think we oughta wait another minute or two,” Snake answered.

  “So do I. If they don’t move on in a couple of minutes, we’ll go see if they need help.”

  I had just gotten the words out of my mouth, when another pair of headlights appeared out of nowhere. Like they had just been turned on when they had pulled up alongside the car. We saw someone walk in front of the lights and in seconds, heard a door slam and the vehicle take off, going south in the direction of Collinwood. Then a truck pulled up in front of the car and sat there for a very short time. We heard a couple of clanking sounds, like hammers hitting steel, and the truck pulled away. The car was gone! Or if it wasn’t gone, the headlights had been turned off.

  “What do you reckon that’s all about,?” Glenn asked.

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “Me too,” Snake agreed.

  After about five minutes or so we cranked the truck and drove off in the direction where the activity had taken place. We had promised we wouldn’t get out on Highway 11, but Bible swearing hadn’t been involved this time. Besides, this was an emergency. Somebody might be in distress. We drove slowly along the shoulder of the road, looking closely to see if anything had been left behind. The only thing we could figure was that the truck we’d seen had hauled away the car.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked to no one in particular.

  “I don’t know,” Glenn replied, “but it looks like somebody may have stole that car. And what was the other car drivin’ up all about?”

  “Maybe the car had trouble and the truck came to pick it up,” Snake said.

  I thought about that for a minute. It was a good deduction by Snake, but it just didn’t make sense. How could they have gotten word to anybody that quickly? We decided we had better mention it to somebody and let the cops know about it. There was nothing we could do about it tonight as late as it was, so we headed for home.

  “Do you remember that night me and you and Tom was at the cemetery and saw those folks down in Old Man Turner’s field?” I asked Glenn.

  “Yeah, about a month or so ago. I’d plum forgot about it. Why?”

  “I don’t know. For some reason this just made me remember it. We ought to go down there tomorrow and check that place out.”

  “Tomorrows the Fourth of July. Ain’t you gonna go to the dinner at the Community Center?”

  “Yeah, I’m goin’ and Snake’s goin’ with us, but the Community Center is at the cemetery. We’ll be right there. We can just sneak out and ease off down there.”

  “But we’ll have on good clothes,” Glenn said, like I was crazy or something.

  “Ain’t you got any imagination, Glenn? Bring some old clothes in a bag if you’re worried. You’re gettin’ as bad as old Cob about your clothes. We get dirty playin’ all those games like the one legged race and the sack race, anyway.”

  “Alright, we’ll ease off down there. We could go in the morning before everything starts, you know.”

  “I’m sleepin’ late in the mornin’. By the time I get in the bed it’s gonna be past midnight and I’m readin’ a good book. I expect to be readin’ for an hour or two after I go to bed.”

  “You’re always readin’ somethin’. I ain’t never seen nobody like you.”

  “Readin’s good and books are good,” Snake finally joined in the conversation.

  Me and Momma had been helping Snake and Frank with their reading. Momma had taught school for a few years and Daddy was an avid reader. There were all kinds of books in our house and a lot of nights we never turned on the TV because we’d all be reading a book. Anyway, Snake was progressing well. He could already read simple things, mostly from sight, and Momma suspected the teachers didn’t spend much time with him in school and probably gave up on him too early. The fact that he was older and more mature now made him much more eager to learn.

  The next day, after dinner was over and the games were beginning, me, Glenn, Snake and Tom disappeared into the woods and made our way down to Old Man Turner’s field. We stayed in the edge of the woods as we worked our way around, so we hopefully wouldn’t be spotted. When we got to where we judged the truck might have been that night, we began looking around to see if there was any loose dirt anywhere. Glenn had mentioned that night that it looked like one of them might have had a shovel. There was no use looking for tire tracks because any that had been left wouldn’t have been distinguishable from all the others that had been made when the hay had been cut, raked into windrows, baled, and then hauled in. We had helped Old Man Turner get in the hay, but at the time didn’t even think about what we’d seen that night. We were just trying to get finished and get out of the hot sun, even if we were getting paid by the hour.

  We all separated and looked in different directions. We had no idea how far into the woods they could have gone, and those woods went on for a long way. In fact they didn’t stop until you were on top of Sand Mountain. But if they had been carrying something they wanted to bury they couldn’t have gone too far with it if it was very heavy at all.

  “Hey, y’all, come here.” It was Snake. We’d told him not to holler, but I doubted if anybody at the celebration could here him, anyway. We were bound to be close to a half mile away, and there were a lot of frivolities going on up there with people yelling and carrying on.

  We all made our way over to where Snake was bent over, digging with a pointed stick. “Ya’ll looka here,” Snake said, never looking up from his digging.
             

  I walked over to where Snake was busy with his primitive shovel. There was no doubt the ground had been disturbed there. There had been old leaves that had fallen from the deciduous trees in years past that had been used to cover the spot up, but Snake said he could tell when he stepped on it that the ground was too soft. Snake might not know a lot of things but he knew the woods. He’d spent almost every day in them since he’d quit school and a considerable amount of time before that.

  “We’re all as dumb as a flock of geese,” I said. “Why didn’t one of us think to bring a shovel?”

  “How were we gonna sneak away carryin’ a shovel,” Tom answered, making good sense.

  “Well, we could have come early and hid one somewhere,” I said, always hating to look stupid.

  “Somebody wanted to sleep late,” Glenn chimed in, looking at me with a shit eating grin on his face.

  “Well, it may take a while, but I guess sticks will have to do.” I started looking around, trying to find a limb lying on the ground that wasn’t too rotten. I spotted one that had a good fork on it that was still partially attached to a hickory tree. After yanking on it and bending it back and forth, it finally let go, sending me stumbling backwards and falling on my ass.

  I joined Snake with the digging. He already had a pretty nice little hole started. The deeper we got the easier the digging got but the problem we were having was removing the dirt from the hole we’d already dug out, so we just decided to dig straight down. If we found anything we might not be able to get it out, but we could always come back later with shovels.

  After we had dug down maybe four feet, with Tom and Glenn removing what dirt they could with their hands away from the hole, I had almost decided we were wasting our time. We were sweating like pigs and our clothes were covered with dirt, which our sweat was turning into mud.                 Then, Snake hit something soft. It sounded kind of like he had hit a watermelon or something. We dug out from around the hole, making it wider. We were beginning to smell a foul odor and knew whatever it was, it had once been a living creature. It couldn’t be a cow, because nobody could have gotten one this far back in the woods without a tractor. It could be a small calf, I thought.

  We eventually got enough dirt moved away to see what it really was, and what I think all three of us thought it would be, but were really hoping it wasn’t. The thought probably wouldn’t have entered our minds a month ago. But with what had been found on the William’s place, now things were different. We dug a little more until we could see what we had thought and feared was real. The skin, at least what we could see of it, was a grayish blue. We thought we were looking at part of a leg. Maybe the thigh. There was no hair on it and I was wondering if it might be a woman. We stopped digging and looked at each other. We would have been terrified a few weeks earlier in a situation like this, but it seemed now it was becoming commonplace. The brain can become desensitized quickly after it has been exposed to something shocking and morbid a few times.