Zion (2 page)

At the kitchen table, the Hardin family gathered for supper. After Tom said grace, the family ate the squirrels that had been cut into quarters and cooked in brown flour gravy with black pepper and milk. Sara, Tom’s wife, baked buttermilk biscuits that were light brown on top, passed from hand to hand in a small cloth-covered wicker basket. On the oak table sat a jar of mayhaw jelly along with fresh butter. Ten-year-old Wesley placed a dollop of jelly on his biscuit. Sara dished herself some boiled okra from a blue and white ceramic bowl. She had picked a mess of fresh okra from the garden while Tom was hunting earlier in the day.

A radio played in the background. The station was in nearby Pickleyville, Baxter Parish Radio, 1410 AM. Bill Evans was on the piano. He was a jazz musician who’d graduated from the local junior college and gone on to become famous. Tom knew Evans from his short stint as a student at Baxter State Junior College during the late 1940s. The Hardins liked listening to the radio every evening, though some neighbors said the jazz music was a backdoor attempt at integration, liberal claptrap pushed by the meddling station owner. Because of the nightly jazz, many of the folks out in the country had quit listening to the radio at night. However, few of them dared to miss “Swap-n-Shopper,” a live classified show that sold everything from rebuilt carburetors to plow mules. It aired three times daily and had a fanatical following.

When the station wasn’t playing jazz late in the evening, the disc jockeys spun old-time country records such as Maybelle Carter, Flatt and Scruggs, and Bill Monroe. The Hardins liked both the jazz and the bluegrass music.

They had no television despite Sara and Wesley’s wishes. The Hardins were frugal, prudent out of necessity and habit. Though they had enough money saved for a new GE, which cost two hundred dollars at the Goodyear store in downtown Pickleyville, they were delaying the purchase until an after-Christmas sale. If Tom had his way, they’d probably never purchase a television set at all. Tom put aside money for hard times, and he believed hard times loomed just around the corner. He planned accordingly, predicting the struggles were apt to start as soon as he sold the hogs and cows on a flooded local market for half their value.

“Tommy, what did the marshal want this morning?” Sara asked.

“Not much. He stopped by to shoot the breeze,” Tom said, knowing she suspected more. He thought perhaps she had watched them from the window, and he’d already been evasive earlier when she asked about the visit. They’d been married for thirteen years.

“The marshal is one to talk a lot,” Wesley said, eating a long, slimy piece of boiled okra, his fork stabbed through the center.

“That’s right. He talks plenty,” Tom said.

The land along the Baxter-Louisburg Parish border was Tom’s native country. He had lived in the area all of his forty years, except for three years spent in the U.S. Navy Seabees. He was the only child of an old jackleg carpenter and farmer. He did not have to go to war but enlisted anyway during World War II. After naval service, he returned to his home in Zion, where he’d lived ever since. The community was founded in the 1880s as a logging camp during the time when the virgin timber was clear cut. The area had water access to Lake Tickfaw through the Big Natalbany River. The village earned its name from Little Zion Methodist Church, a congregation founded during a brush arbor revival in 1883. The Hardins were among the first members of the Methodist congregation. Tom’s grandparents were charter members and builders of the first sanctuary. They were distantly related to the son of a Methodist circuit rider, John Wesley Hardin, the Texas outlaw.

Tom owned nearly one hundred head of hogs and two dozen cattle. They foraged the unfenced rangeland, most of which was owned by Fitz-Blackwell, a multinational timber company. But a month earlier, the Baxter Parish Police Jury passed a binding ordinance in the dark of night, which would make the grazing of livestock on the open rangeland illegal on January 1, 1965. Tom hunted wildlife and ran his animals on the timber company land, property soon to be posted. This already caused him to feel somewhat like an outlaw. He realized that in a measure of two months this way of life would end forever. Unlike the relative calm of a late October day, the fires of change were already stirring. Tom was not ready to make adjustments, but he knew he would have to make changes soon enough.

Livestock was a major stake in the Hardin family’s livelihood, and the money earned through the stock meant that Sara could stay at home and not work outside the home. But now Tom was bracing for economic hardship, including more work laboring as a carpenter and general roustabout at the brickyard over on Highway 190 to make ends meet, more overtime if the foreman would grant him the extra hours.

Most people in Zion and southwest Baxter Parish, as well as southeast Louisburg Parish were of Scotch-Irish extraction. The exceptions were small enclaves of French and Germans in Milltown, the Hungarians in Kilgore, the Sicilians up in Liberty City, and the sections of blacks scattered across the region in their settlements. But these were all minority populations. The Scotch-Irish residents were predominantly Protestant, typically Baptists or Methodists, and their frontier religion was keenly anti-intellectual and clannish, often bigoted, and fearful of those outside their kith and kin.

Tom, however, saw little truth in the common notions of white supremacy or other obsessions taken up by the racists in the newly formed White Citizens’ Council in Pickleyville. He had been influenced early in his life by Methodism’s key doctrines of sanctification and Christian perfection, the teachings of John Wesley from the 1700s. Tom worked hard to live an upright and pious life, and he spent no time looking down on other races of people. Yet he, too, could be cautious around outsiders and somewhat distrustful. This was practiced in general and not necessarily along racial lines. The pine tree war was causing him more than casual concern, especially after being accused of arson by the marshal, and there were times when he was somewhat paranoid about the conflict in his community.

But Tom was a different sort of man because he was one of Pickleyville Public Library’s best patrons. He had been the salutatorian of Milltown High in 1941. As a boy, he’d read the works of Zane Grey and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. In recent years, he’d read Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
twice. Each week, he would pick up a few books from the library and read them during the late evenings when he wasn’t hunting or doing small carpentry projects. Tom planned to vote for Lyndon Johnson on November 3rd when many of his neighbors were voting for Barry Goldwater, most casting a Republican ballot for the first time in their lives.

Over the years, men had made snide comments about Tom’s peculiar ways, his reading habits, and his weekly forays into the public library collection. Some called him “Little Einstein” behind his back because of his regular library patronage, but he never worried much about what people thought.

Sara also read widely and regularly. Wesley, too, was an early and voracious reader. In the years prior to meeting Tom, Sara had studied at Newcomb College, the women’s college at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she earned a liberal arts degree. Tom had met her soon after she’d started working as a clerk at the public library in downtown Pickleyville following her graduation from Newcomb.

When World War II ended, Tom studied at the junior college in Pickleyville, enduring several part-time semesters on the GI Bill of Rights, and he considered becoming a history teacher. However, the parish public schools were run by a semi-literate mob of fraternity boys, Delta Tau Deltas and Kappa Alphas, local men he did not care for, the likes of which also ran the timber companies. The idea of teaching school for these stooges gave him pause about furthering his formal education.

Dealing with naturally corrupt folks discouraged him, so he left the college without earning a two-year degree. Instead of becoming a high school history teacher, he lived as a subsistence farmer on a patch of family land and raised hogs and cattle in the open range, working jobs locally—at the brickyard, over at the creosote plant for a time, and at the bag factory during different periods. For several years, he milked cows at a friend’s dairy until the farm finally went under. Sometimes he remodeled houses and undertook small carpentry jobs for neighbors, but the earnings were paltry at best. Tom was the peculiar embodiment of a man with a strong work ethic but very little ambition. He believed that the parable in Luke chapter 12 cautioned the faithful against building bigger and bigger barns. He worked hard but never had dreams beyond Zion.

Tom harbored few regrets until recently when he was forced to begin removing his cattle and hogs from the land. People believed Fitz-Blackwell had paid bribes to pass the ordinance that banned the livestock from the woods, the unfenced open range owned by big landholders and timber companies throughout Baxter Parish, and this corruption made the loss of range rights all the more grievous. The stock ban was not what enraged Tom the most. It was the utter waste of killing the oaks and other hardwoods, poisoning them with dimethylamine salt and other chemical herbicides. Some large trees were killed by ringing them through the bark with a gas-powered “beaver machine.” The timber companies would employ any means necessary to kill hardwood trees, even cutting them down with chainsaws just so they’d die in the forest and make room for young pines. To Tom’s way of thinking, killing a hundred-year-old live oak tree and letting it rot in the forest was a form of fratricide and poor stewardship of God’s resources, a testament to man’s greed.

A few days after the marshal’s visit, Tom drove to the feed store in Milltown to buy a sack of grain for his horse. It was half past four o’clock, and he was dog-tired from stacking green bricks most of the day in the kiln when he wasn’t driving the Gravely tractor that pulled the brick cart on a narrow railroad track through the place. The Gravely and cart hauled bricks to and from the kiln, and then Tom and a black laborer stacked pallets of fired bricks onto larger pallets that were loaded by a diesel forklift.

Beam’s Feed and Farm fronted the railroad tracks on Main Street. Tom parked down from the store entrance. As he got out of his Ford pickup truck, he heard a catcall. Tom saw Sloan Parnell, a well-connected timber company hack, sitting on the tailgate of a brand new International Scout, a red four-wheel drive vehicle with a white top and a short box for a bed. He was smoking a little cigar, talking to a tall black-haired woman with a blouse that showed plenty of cleavage. Tom recognized her as Charity LeBlanc, a local preacher’s daughter, nothing more than a child in a woman’s body. She often ran with upper crust men.

He looked at Sloan and made eye contact with him. He headed toward the store entrance, offering no gesture of friendship or acknowledgement. Several months earlier, while making his rounds checking on his hogs not far from Parnell family land, Tom almost had to draw his rifle on Sloan after he made a verbal threat, claiming he had a loaded pistol in his truck and calling Tom a criminal trespasser. He still wondered how he had avoided bloodshed, but Sloan finally backed off before he had to pull out the Savage deer rifle from the saddle scabbard.

Tom’s father was a pious Methodist layman, but his father’s two brothers were lapsed, backslid and wayward, often bad to drink. Some nights during Tom’s childhood in the 1930s, his two uncles would come to the house in Zion and want to fight his father, and he would have to oblige them to protect the family. Occasionally, his father got bloodied fighting the pair of drunkards, and they’d come back the next day when they were sober with a new shirt or other items to replace what they’d destroyed the night before. As a result, Tom never drank, not even while in the navy, and he was always one to avoid violence whenever he could despite the region’s notoriety for hotheadedness and blood feuds.

“I’m a Fitz-Blackwell man now,” Sloan hollered to Tom. He stood up from the tailgate and made a flanking jog toward the feed store entryway.

Tom knew he’d have to pass Sloan to buy the sack of grain. “Is that so?” he said and kept walking.

“Damn straight it is, and I’ve got a thousand-dollar reward out on the arsonist that burned the pines over on Rogers Road, you silly son of a bitch,” Sloan said, closing in.

“Great. Maybe I ought to go claim it by bringing you in,” Tom said. He took a quick glance at the man as he approached, but he kept walking.

Tom had not set fire to the patch of woods, not the patch on Rogers Road, not any forest at all. There were dozens of men who hated Fitz-Blackwell, hated the killing of the oaks. They despised the removal of the livestock and the end of open range in the Zion community and elsewhere. Almost any man in the rural area could be guilty. He understood Sloan had no evidence against him. He was free of guilt, but he often wondered what good this was in such a crooked and fallen world.

When Tom placed his hand on the brass doorknob, he felt a shove to his shoulder, then a second push to his back almost simultaneously. He was nearly knocked off balance, his chest hitting the door, but he was able to spin around, and Sloan was the perfect distance from Tom’s right fist. He hit the man square in the nose with a solid blow, one sure and effective punch to the face, which made his nose butterfly into a crimson spectacle of smashed flesh.

“Don’t put your hands nowhere on me,” Tom said.

Sloan was stunned. He was as large as Marshal Brownlow, even a little taller, and stouter. Now he was holding his nose with his hat knocked off his head. He started backing up, crawfishing like a coward down the sidewalk.

Tom pursued him with his fists in front of his chest like a welterweight boxer. He slammed him with a right jab to the torso and then a left fist to the temple. Sloan went down, his knees buckling, and he looked to the sky as if watching a long line of shooting stars in the broad daylight.