Zion (19 page)

Marshal Brownlow cared for the citizens of the Ninth Ward with whom he was entrusted, families that he was charged to protect and serve. While he didn’t have as much energy as before the heart attack, he hoped he would compensate for the lack of strength with heightened wisdom and experience. He couldn’t be sure of this, but he didn’t take anything for granted either. Sometimes he wondered if he had learned anything significant in his fifty-four years of living. There was a better focus afforded by age that he understood came from his closeness to death. Yet he doubted his own wisdom now more often than not. Just working in the Marshal’s Office for his career was evidence of bad judgment in and of itself, he regularly told people. Any fool should know better than to do such a thing.

Death was coming soon like an old friend or neighbor stopping by for a visit. So he tried to keep watch over important matters. He’d been invited by fate to do what was crucial now and let the trivial fall by the wayside. The grave would soon call and say the hour was right for a final reunion, a call impossible to miss or refuse. During despondent moments, it seemed as if life was failing, going down like a shooting star. The job itself and the heavy responsibilities could cause his death before he could retire.

Regardless, he had been reunited with some old acquaintances, Sloan Parnell, Charity LeBlanc Claiborne, and James Luke Cate. These, along with Tom and Sara Hardin together, now resembled one big unhappy family. More like a circle of hate, the marshal thought.

One of the difficulties in dealing with Charity’s story was that he didn’t really know what he should do next. He didn’t have any new evidence at all. All he really had was the testimony of a crazy woman, a woman who said she was led by the Holy Ghost.

As a Methodist, the marshal believed in the Spirit, but not all spirits could be trusted. Didn’t the Bible say in First John to “test the spirits,” a verse he learned as a youth? He dared not forward anything to the District Attorney prematurely and create more havoc. And what was there to forward anyway? He had nothing to give the High Sheriff either, a man who cared not a whit about Zion or Lizard Bayou or the dealings down in the lower end of the parish. Sheriff Haltom Roberts had written off Zion and Milltown from his work responsibilities years earlier. The marshal was glad, because Roberts was always more trouble than he was worth, as rotten as a sack of putrid apples, corrupt all the way to the core.

He bet himself that if Charity went crying to Judge Parnell, it would cost him a hundred dollars’ worth of hell. So now he had to be sure, completely certain about who beat and raped Sara Hardin. Even the manner of Sloan’s death had to be questioned again. He had some suspicions that people were lying all around, everyone but Tom. In fact, he trusted that Tom was telling the truth, and as dangerous as it was to trust another man, he had to believe in Tom Hardin.

Yet the primary question remained. He had to solve the rape and beating that nearly killed Sara Hardin. Why didn’t she tell him the truth in 1964 or now in 1974? A secondary question was why were the two men following Sloan Parnell the night he died if not to kill him? Did all of these really loose fitting pieces fit together somehow like gears in a mechanism? Who was lying about what and why? Worst of all, the marshal began to doubt he still had the ability to follow the questions to accurate conclusions. It all might be too much for him now.

Sara reached for the small hope chest that her father had given her for her birthday the year before he left Blytheville for good. The chest was made from cedar and was smooth as glass. It was hidden in the top of the hallway closet. The chest was overhead, and she stood on a footstool to get it down. She could barely pull the thing down without dropping it on her head like a big brick.

The chest had a brass lock and matching hardware hinges. The green brass was corroded on its edges. She placed it on the bed and unlocked the box with a key that she kept in the bottom of a small wicker purse stowed away inside the bedroom chifforobe, hidden in a location Tom would never look. He wasn’t one to dig through the house anyway, and she was sure he would never try to mess with the locked box.

Inside the chest was her trove of letters, diaries, and handbills from plays, movies, evidence of relationships with men before and after her marriage. Some were erotic letters from the Newcomb College days, personal memoirs of lustful men in different places and times.

Sara grew up hardscrabble in Arkansas. Blytheville was a farm town on the Mississippi River. Her father was a gambler, and he abandoned the family and moved to Louisiana’s Crescent City when she was twelve years old. Her childhood was spent from pillar to post, in and out of rent houses in the Arkansas Delta, never knowing which night the family would be forced to move, or under what kind of dire circumstances. Her father’s departure only made matters worse. The poverty went from bad to horrible. She spent her teen years wondering about his life in the Big Easy, wondering why he left.

One Christmas she received a card from her father with a return address of Pirate’s Alley in the French Quarter, the same block where William Faulkner had written
Soldiers’ Pay
. The card said he was working hard on the docks, and he would send her some money soon. It said she ought to do well in school and listen to her mother and grandmother. Sara was a precocious girl. Throughout her childhood, her only refuge was the county library, and her studious reading made her one of the best pupils to graduate from Blytheville High School despite her rural poverty. She wrote him numerous times, but her father never responded to the letters. This postcard was the last word from him. When she turned seventeen, she applied to Newcomb College and moved south to New Orleans. She attended the school on a full scholarship.

She never found him in the city, nor did she ever locate a grave. Her mother grew deathly ill back in Blytheville, and she died during Sara’s second year at Newcomb. But Sara stayed in school until she graduated. Then she took the job as a library clerk in Pickleyville and soon met Tom.

In the box, there were pictures of old boyfriends and lovers. She had keepsakes, a gold necklace James Luke had given her and a bracelet with some small diamonds and rubies that Sloan bought for her in 1964. There were pictures of men, one of herself nude and taken by her boyfriend, a photographer and film developer at the
Times-Picayune
newspaper. The photographs made her wish for her younger days before she met Tom, a time years before James Luke beat her and left her for dead.

She had spent this formative time as a woman living a hidden sexual life in the Crescent City, and the hiddenness continued intermittently until the attack. Afterward, she never had another liaison, now almost ten years, as if she had learned her lesson.

The diaries recalled trysts, several with strangers in the library book stacks on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, where she had worked while in college. Her sex with James Luke started soon after he married Nelda, not long after the Korean War, and her fling with Sloan began in 1964 when Sloan came to the house to apologize to Tom after the fight at the feed store. Sara was at home alone. She knew him from back when she worked at the public library in Pickleyville. They used to flirt a lot when she worked, and he was just a high school kid. On the day he showed up at the front door to see Tom, she invited him inside for coffee and was soon on her knees and in his lap at the kitchen table, his blue jeans pulled down to his boots. This is how their sex got started—just as fast as a fire burning in the woods.

After she married Tom, the writing in her diary was done in code. Going out for ice cream was sex in a public place like the library, falling ill was sex in her marriage bed with another man, and buying a new robe was nearly getting caught. She wrote of these occasions to document her infidelity for her own recollection, never to be read by anyone else. A level of power was involved in these events. But times had changed now. Sara had aged over the past ten years, and the former decadence was little more than a ghost. The woman, now forty-six years old, had saved the secret history in the hope chest, “hope” being a peculiar name for what she kept in it. Everything in the box came from the past, not unlike the beleaguered and forlorn contents of a coffin. Hope seemed to mean a bright future, but this was a time of unending darkness.

She made a plan to sell the jewelry to a pawn broker in Baton Rouge on Highway 190 and to burn everything else. She believed she needed money to leave Tom, now that the marshal was snooping around, not to mention the rift between her husband and Wesley, which was about all she could take. It was time to offer these worthless mementos to the flame as if sacrificed in some religious rite, but the valuables she’d redeem for cash money.

Sara took a burlap feed sack from Tom’s shop, the old livestock barn now remodeled for carpentry work. She half-filled the sack with all she kept from her hidden life, layers upon layers of it, and packed it all into the sack, which made the cedar box as hollow as a cave echo. She took a black diary from the burlap sack and skimmed over it one last time. These words could cause a man to kill his wife or lover or give the law reason to put me in jail for obstruction of justice, she thought. The past needed to be burned now.

She put the much lighter hope chest back into its place at the top of the closet where it had reposed for over two decades. She stuffed the jewelry into her purse and walked outside with the burlap sack. She lit a cigarette when she reached the back steps and smoked. After a quick break sitting on the steps looking at the sack full of ghosts, she walked to the steel burn barrel in the backyard near Tom’s workshop and dumped the sack, lighting some letters with a match. She took the last pull from her cigarette and dropped it into the barrel. There was little wind, not enough to even make the pine needles move on the trees. The paper made good kindling. The letters were dry as dust and the fire took off quickly. She could see the contents of the sack uniting with the flames, diaries and letters, even some small sketches from college art classes. The fire made her little historical record escape from public scrutiny for all time, the diminutive library archive burning.

Sara stood and watched the pyre go upward like a rising obelisk. She was repelled by the glowing heat. She smoked a Viceroy and watched the fire die down slightly. Then she went over to the workshop and took a long mimosa tree limb that Tom used to stoke the fire in the oil drum. Jabbing it, she made the fire grow again, the paper circling and cycling into carbon. It was a consuming fire, erasing the only hard evidence of years gone by.

The woman watched it burn for a while, and then took the cigarette pack from her front pants pocket and lit a new one. She stared at the fire. She smoked. She talked quietly to herself. “That LeBlanc woman is pure evil. She always was the worst. A jealous woman. Truly the worst I’ve ever known. A sorry godforsaken woman, wide-eyed and always talking,” she said aloud. Sara took another deep drag. “The Parnells will be involved before it’s over with, just watch.”

She thought about hitting Charity with a wooden club. She spoke to the pyre. “What a fraud, a commoner just like me living in a rich man’s house. A man and woman living in a big house. And why is she doing this now? Just because my husband wouldn’t build some shitty shelves for her. Because I slept with Sloan so long ago. Did she think he was going to marry her or something? And Sloan is dead. I was the only other person who got hurt because of this, nearly killed. I swallowed it all and kept the peace, just tried to protect my son and family. For what? I should find her and kill her.”

She stared at the oil drum. Everything burned as she smoked the cigarette. She held the soot-darkened mimosa limb in her hand and stirred the dying fire. She recalled Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
. Paper burns at 451 degrees. She could tell the diaries were gone now, nothing left but the book boards. Just a little flame and smoke. She didn’t want anything left, not a single readable page in the barrel or floating in the air. “Where will it all end and who will live to stop it?” Sara asked the smoke.

After a time, she peered into the drum and saw that it was gone. She believed it was good. She gave the ashes a final stir with the limb and walked back to the house. She was dry-eyed, not a tear on her face. She was doing what needed to be done, and she needed to do even more.

That afternoon, Sara drove to Baton Rouge for an evening class at the LSU Library School. Each semester and summer for more than two years she had driven to Baton Rouge for a night course at LSU, slowly working her way through a master’s degree in library service.

On the drive over, she stopped just past the East Baton Rouge Parish border. It took nearly an hour to make the drive in her little Gremlin. She stopped past the Amite River and brought the jewelry to a pawnbroker for cash and few questions.

The pawnbroker was a tall, thinly built man with hair slicked back on his head and laced with Pomade. He wore a dark leather vest and looked like a gospel preacher with his hair and attentive manner. For the jewelry, he counted two hundred and thirteen dollars into her hand. She was shocked by how much the items brought.

The woman had always kept a little money back from Tom in a maternal stash, money stowed away in a desk drawer at the junior college library, funds if she ever needed it. Now was the time when she needed it. She was sure it was time to leave him, and she believed he would know about the affairs with Sloan and James Luke before it was said and done, the marshal slipping around asking questions, Charity talking. Perhaps Tom already had his suspicions.

Sara had a vision of Charity singing like a witch in the woods, calling down curses upon her head and the heads of her family members. Lightning cracked, the devil beat his wife as the rain fell to the ground, a tale like she’d heard as a child in Arkansas. And if Tom Hardin ever finds out who raped me, it won’t be because I told him, she thought.

As the pawnbroker thanked her for the business, Sara glimpsed a glass case with pistols in it. She stepped over to it and bent at the waist and stared at a snub-nosed .38 Special, a Rossi. It was a small revolver, and it had a stenciled sign in front: PERFECT FOR LADIES. Her right hand passed over the top of the glass.

“Are you in the market for a handgun, ma’am?” the pawnbroker asked. “This old world sure ain’t getting no safer.”

“No,” she said as she slipped the bills into her pocketbook. But she looked again at the weapon and then at the pawnbroker, and she thought about Charity and the current troubles, how the woman was causing a train wreck that needed to be stopped.

“Ma’am, that sure would be a fine pistol for a lady such as yourself. It’s just the proper size. My lovely wife has one exactly like it. She keeps it in her purse at all times.” He reached into the case and took the pistol from the velvet shelf, and he placed it in front of her on the top of the glass, laying it directly before her.

Sara could see the paper tag on a string that read “$94.95.” She felt the wood grips, held the pistol in her palm, pointed the revolver to the floor, sighting the concrete. Then she stared at the slim man and asked, “Would you take eighty?”

“Since you’ve done business here today, I can let you have it for that amount plus tax.”

“I’ll take it. And a box of bullets.”

“God bless you, ma’am. I hope it protects you and yours from this profoundly wicked and fallen world.”

When the university class was done that evening and Sara had driven back to Baxter Parish, she went to the campus library and put the remaining jewelry money with her other cash in the manila folder in her desk drawer. The folder was marked S. HARDIN’S PERSONAL PROPERTY.

She went inside the Periodicals Room and searched the Pickleyville
Star-Register
for a cheap rental, maybe a garage apartment downtown. She wasn’t ready to leave yet, but she was getting close, and she worried about waiting until the fall when the junior college students took over most of the open apartments. She was far too old to rent a room in anyone’s house, and she wanted a place of her own. Wesley might need a couch to sleep on when he came home on the weekends, and the apartment needed to be a price she could afford on her little clerk’s salary, half of what Tom made as a carpenter. A man working at the college always made more money than a woman. With his side carpentry business, Tom brought home three times as much as she did after taxes. No matter what, she had to come up with a way to live on her own.

On the way home from stowing the money at Doolittle Library, she thought about Wesley and his troubles with Tom. But Tom wasn’t the ultimate problem. It was Charity LeBlanc and James Luke Cate. She wondered if using the loaded pistol in her purse to get Charity and James Luke off her back and out of her life would take care of it. She didn’t know what she wanted to do, or if she had the courage to do anything, but she decided to be ready for the worst kind of hell coming on the horizon, something even worse than being beaten, raped, and left for dead. Sara decided to be the world’s punching bag no longer.