Zion (18 page)

Brownlow drove away from his red brick house and onto the road. Deputy Marshal Freddy Wentworth, a part-timer, awaited him deep in a pasture a half a mile off Upper Louth Road in the Zion community. Wentworth had left a shirt stowed away inside a hollow water oak that Brownlow planned to use for the training exercise. When the marshal arrived, he got the dog out of the kennel and Duke gave a loud “woof,” and they went through an open gate to the hay field and to the water oak where the flannel shirt lay. The marshal removed the shirt and gave it to the hound.

The dog took the scent from the shirt and began tugging on the leash and barking wildly, head close to the ground and trying to run. The marshal was not up to this much activity, he thought, yet he felt energized by the rush of the hound on the scent. This marvel of selective breeding and genetics was nearly dragging the big man across the field, ready or not, heart attack victim or not. Brownlow was well into middle age, and he was in poor health overall, but he kept up the pace and tried not to choke back the hound with the leather leash as he dug in with his paws and pulled him along. He felt like an old-timer as he followed behind the dog, the leather leash encircling his right wrist, but the thrill made him try his best to keep up with the hound’s kinetic energy.

They passed the edge of a fence line and into a stand of trees, and then to an overgrown bed of a dummy line railroad. After another five minutes into the woods, the “escapee,” Wentworth, was found sitting in a fork of a rangy mayhaw tree just above eye-level. The dog treed him, barked madly and jumping in the air as if to pull him down to the ground and maul him.

“Halt,” he said to Wentworth in the tree. The dog howled and lunged, bellowing an ear-rattling noise of continuous barks.

“That dog has got plumb good,” Wentworth said.

“Thanks. Now get down from that tree, Zacchaeus,” Brownlow said. “Let’s go eat some dinner in town. I’m already about pooped out.”

Sara was tired of Tom’s stringent discipline, his perfectly squared corners, and the constant demand that every angle be right and every wall plumb. His superlative sense of rightness, however, and reliability was what drew her to him in 1950 soon after taking the job in Pickleyville as a library clerk. When he showed up at the library reference desk and asked her for a copy of
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, which the nearly comatose head librarian kept locked in a cabinet, Sara was smitten. The book was authored by a Negro woman, and the head librarian hated Negro authors. The copy of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel was a donation, and she kept it locked away. In truth, Sara had purchased the novel herself at Bayou Booksellers in the Vieux Carré and gave it to the library, slipping it into the night book drop at the front door with a typed note saying it was donated by the local NAACP chapter. The reason Tom wanted to read it was because he’d seen an enthusiastic recommendation of the book in a magazine. When he returned the novel a week later, they chatted about it, and he asked Sara out on their first date. What made her accept the offer of a movie and dinner was that Tom seemed solid, honest, a religious man, and certainly the only white person other than herself in Baxter Parish reading Hurston in 1950. She wanted a change in her life. She longed for a stable life with a trustworthy man, and Tom Hardin was that man.

As good as Tom was at his carpentry, Sara was even better at concealing things. She was able to camouflage almost anything. She was, to his right angles and plumb walls, a crooked mystery hidden from view and outside of normal geometric calculations. At first, this didn’t diminish their marriage, but over time, it caused a distance and aloofness, something she tried to overcome with other men during intermittent liaisons. Her relations with Sloan Parnell had never been a romance, but only rebellion against Tom and her cloistered life in Zion. The affair with James Luke added excitement, and it ended after he almost killed her in 1964. It was Sara’s specialty to hide and conceal everything closest to her true self, and the attack was no exception.

She took the day off from work after meeting with the marshal, calling in sick. She pulled the pack of cigarettes from her purse. Tom didn’t even know that she smoked. She could wait two or three days if necessary before she lit one, before the flash of fire and the hot breath of nicotine. The woman could then be satisfied with one draw if that was all she had available. It was half the joy to realize she could smoke and Tom, her husband of so many years, didn’t know it. His daily schedule and structure lent to this and other deceptions great and small. She could smoke on the back step or in the yard. And if he smelled something, she’d blame it on a neighbor who’d come over to visit earlier in the day. It was this private world that gave her pleasure, like the pages of a banned novel offering delight through its taboo.

Wesley knew about her cigarettes, but there was an unwritten agreement between them. He was never to speak about her smoking in front of his father, which signified a note of loyalty they had for one another, a bond of loyalty and subversion they held together as one since his birth.

With the marshal’s investigation menacing, the series of falsehoods that made up Sara Hardin’s life was essentially over and she knew it. Two decades of attending Little Zion Methodist Church had taught her that the only clear pathway to salvation was through heartfelt repentance and holy living, but the hard edges of her life were closing in around her. The attempt at controlling the world was destined to end badly. She put down her cigarette, and the smoke made a half-circle in the ashtray on the window sill in the kitchen. She poured herself two fingers of vodka in a porcelain coffee cup. This was her chosen spirit, a secret drink without any smell and as clear as water. She had loved to drink it with Sloan and James Luke and other men over the years. Sometimes she liked to sip intrigue beyond just dusty old books in the library. Though she was stranded in Zion, Louisiana, she was free to roam elsewhere in her daydreams. For years, she could escape through sex during secret rendezvous with men. Now every swallow of vodka reminded her of the past.

She could see her accuser’s face, Charity Claiborne’s lurid smile. The woman’s eyes, the sun-scorched crow’s feet covered up by makeup, the cost of sin and strife, the late night carousing that never ended. Sara had been nominally Baptist before marrying Tom, dunked in the Shipley Creek outside of Blytheville, Arkansas, as a child. The Methodists were rarely negligent in lambasting sin, but who could hold court with the Baptists? Their only joy was in self-denial and self-loathing, putting sin under the blood of the Lamb. Either repent or hide from it, she learned, was the central message, and she chose the latter.

Sara walked out into the yard and took a final drag from the Viceroy cigarette and dropped the butt onto the ground to extinguish it with her heel. She then picked it up and emptied the remaining tobacco from the butt into the grass. She wrapped the filter into a piece of tinfoil and placed it inside her purse until she could find a safe place at work to throw it away. She put a piece of Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum into her mouth to cover her breath and conceal the tobacco even more fully, and she cleaned out the ashtray with water from the sink and put it away in the kitchen cabinet where it stayed when she wasn’t smoking.

The marshal’s visit had persuaded James Luke to act, though he pondered it over the course of three weeks, trying to make a clear and precise plan. James Luke was sure that he had to do something about Charity. She was like a loose wheel on a car, and somebody was going to get hurt sooner rather than later. He decided to return to Pickleyville to take care of the trouble first hand.

A few days after the marshal came to Natchez, he told Heloise about a special fishing trip coming up that he’d been invited to attend with a bunch of Army Corps of Engineers bureaucrats. These men were several steps up the ladder, and he needed to get to know them for his own advancement. He said that he was going to an Army Corps reservoir near Hot Springs called DeGray Lake. They’d spend a few days fishing, drinking, and playing cards at the lake, and he’d use boats brought along by other men. He didn’t want to go, but it was all necessary business, Army Corps political games required to get ahead.

He told her about the trip while they were eating dinner at Queen’s Tavern in Natchez, the oldest standing building in town, which dated from the 1700s. They ate porterhouse steaks and drank red wine. When they were done with the steaks and waiting for dessert, they continued talking more about the fishing trip to Arkansas.

“James Luke, I fully understand the point behind the trip,” Heloise said. “Business is business, even if it’s government business. It’s all the same. Don’t feel guilty about leaving me.”

“That’s why I married you, honey. You’re a woman that understands how the world works,” he said.

“That I do,” she said.

“Well, take this for your prize for letting me go away for a few days,” James Luke said as he reached into his sport coat pocket and retrieved a new necklace, pearls that he’d bought for her in Jackson at Fondren Jewelers. He displayed it to her in the velvet case and then stood and put it around her neck.

“My dear, you’re one of a kind,” she said.

“I know it,” said James Luke as he kissed her cheek and rubbed her shoulders.

On Friday, July 26th, he packed the Suburban. He loaded it with food and camping supplies, his canvas sleeping bag, Coleman lantern, and a propane cooker. He prepared a week’s worth of dehydrated vegetables and plenty of water. He could stay longer than a week depending on how he rationed the food and if he caught any fish, or so he told his wife. But it was all a ruse. This was just a precaution. Indeed, he planned to be back not long before midnight on Sunday evening. He hid the Remington Gamemaster deer rifle with a scope in the truck the night before. It was nestled away in a steel storage box with plenty of ammunition. He was going on a journey, but not to catch any fish.

The marshal’s visit itself had not bothered him too much, though he wasn’t disregarding it in the least. James Luke was used to jostling with lawmen through his rent houses, the clandestine drug activity, and his regular work as a field supervisor on the take with the Army Corps. He had bought and paid for several lawmen on both sides of the river since coming to Mississippi, and he learned that they mostly wanted the pretense of power, and that their loyalty was always offered to the highest bidder or it went to the most aggressive sycophant in their midst. What did bother him, however, was Charity’s constant talking. That was the real threat, and he saw no choice but to stop it. She wasn’t rational, so he needed to shut her up fast.

Much of James Luke’s approach to human affairs was learned in Korea. The military lessons were just as true now as they were in 1951. He faced the same kind of duplicity and human emotions, the exact same hypocrisy. He was usually taking something away from a person and knew the processes for forcing things to go in his direction. He believed stealing wasn’t stealing if you got to keep the booty of war free and clear, and it didn’t matter what kind of war: personal or international. It didn’t matter as long as the winner took all.

He believed the easiest approach to break a person was not to torture him with inhumane cruelty, but to use either pandering or shame. Either exploit their egos or their guilt for a higher purpose, your own purpose. James Luke’s understanding of man’s natural weaknesses served him well, and he planned to use this knowledge in Baxter Parish.

When the marshal told him about the complaint coming forth all of these years later, he immediately knew who it was. Charity was the only person alive who knew what went on between him and Sara and Sloan—other than Sara herself—and if the marshal had come to see him after Sara’s erstwhile confession, it would have been with a warrant, he was sure of it.

He shared a bed with Charity at a camp on Lake Ponchatoula a number of times in 1963 and ’64, and he enjoyed her sex. He believed she was scared to death of him. He hit her a few times one night just for good measure, when she was acting like a religious nut, and she stayed away from him afterward. He knew her better than she knew herself, however, and he understood that her mind was scrambled like an egg in an electric blender. She was as crazy as a Christmas hen in a lightning storm. Though she had been granted eternal salvation, he thought it a tragedy that redemption of this sort would fail to make her remember her limits and her place in the world.

The .30-06 rifle and the .45 pistol, his old comrades, were taking the ride in case any trouble came to town. Though he mostly understood Charity’s state of nature, he never could be sure what religion might do to her perverted little mind. There was but one way to reason with her, and it was not like a normal person.

He looked down at his truck seat at his leather-covered Bible, the King James Version of 1611, a copy with red edges that reminded him of Jesus Christ bleeding on the cross. He knew what he’d do to talk sense into her: Beat her with the one book she respected until she either died or learned again how to behave herself and quit squawking to the law.

James Luke ordered a second gas tank when he bought the Suburban a year earlier. He had it installed in the undercarriage, a retrofit that cost him extra money at the dealership. This was just the kind of journey he had in mind when he added the tank with its twenty-five gallons of gas in escrow. It might come in handy one day. He wanted to keep a low profile, and the Chevrolet 454 lapped the gasoline at twelve miles per gallon in normal driving, and the high price of gas since the Arab oil embargo made James Luke curse. The four barrel carburetor was practically a sieve if he pressed down on the pedal. He didn’t want to gas up anywhere in Louisiana, so he took enough fuel to fulfill his little mission. In case things went awry, he had plenty enough for the trip there and back plus any essential excursions.

He could not remember the exact date of his last trip to Baxter Parish—or even his last time driving through the place. He seemed to think it was in 1967. Today, he drove east toward Meadville and then farther east past I-55 and to old Highway 51.

On the highway south of Summit, he listened to the radio. Fire and brimstone preachers and twangy gospel music always gave him a peculiar comfort for some indescribable reason. He preferred listening to the high drama of the Pentecostals, and their hard singsong voices punctuating the truck cab with the words of death and life.

An evangelist named Leviticus Showers gasped for air and breathed hard, as if the good news included a long marathon up a steep spiritual mountain that left the preacher seeking just enough oxygen to finish his sermon. The preacher on the AM station in McComb proclaimed, “The Lord is ever-following you with his watching eyes—AH-HA. His eye is upon your—AH-HA-LA—sinful ways day and night—AH-HA-SHA—night and day.” James Luke smiled as he listened to the preacher, an evangelist at the Full Faith Church in Progress, Mississippi. He was pleased to hear the message on his way through this hard and treacherous world. He could visualize the preacher sweating and wiping his forehead in the radio studio, his Bible wide open on a rusty music stand in front of him, the microphone square before his lips, not a single page of prepared notes in front of him.

But this message did not bring James Luke to a sublime religious experience. Instead, it was simply free entertainment, a way to pass the time when he drove. At best, God was a cosmic entertainer. James Luke had a peculiar fascination with the Almighty. He was drawn to any source of power, and he liked to observe devotion to a true master. Furthermore, he wanted to elicit fear rather than devotion. Devotion was cheap, but fear was a fine currency. He believed the fear of God was the beginning of power, and power was what James Luke liked most.

He planned for the battle. He was working hard to bring the parts together that had been dropped into his lap by Marshal Brownlow. James Luke would take the trouble to its natural end if necessary. He’d do whatever nature required, and then go back home to Natchez and his profitable work in the slums. “I’ll deal with flies by swatting them—AH-HA-SHA. Let the flies die, by God—AH-HA—or let them repent—AH-HA-SHA—of their sins against me,” he said, mimicking the evangelist on the radio station.