Zion (4 page)

It was almost winter, cool during the day and downright chilly at night. Tom kept working forty-hour weeks at the brickyard, and on top of this, he tried to catch and sell as many hogs and cattle as possible. Now and then, a local farmer would pen some of Tom’s stock, and he’d go pick up the cows or hogs, and thank his neighbor, remembering the goodwill and mutual help for the future.

The forest fires weren’t slowing. New fires were being set most nights. Tom realized there wasn’t much he could do about the changing times, and he was without hope that the politicians would stop the ordinance ending open range. He had not seen Sloan Parnell since the fight at the feed store, and he only saw Marshal Brownlow at church on Sundays. When he did see the marshal, relations were cordial.

On Monday afternoon, November 9th, Corrine Travis, Tom’s closest cousin, came over to the Hardin home to pick up some fresh yard eggs from the family’s chicken coop and saw the front door ajar. Jubal was loose, a short piece of broken chain dangling from his thick neck. Tom’s truck was parked beside the house in its normal spot. Tom had caught a ride to work with a neighbor so that Sara would have transportation to go to the grocery and run some errands. Corrine beat on the doorjamb and then called out, but no one answered. Fearful that something was wrong, she went into the house and looked in the rooms. The interior doors were open. Corrine found Sara in the bedroom. At first, she thought the woman was dead, but she found a faint pulse at her wrist, showing life left in the battered body.

While Tom was working at the brickyard and Wesley was at the school in Milltown, Sara had been attacked. She was raped, beaten unconscious, naked and tied to an iron bed with stiff ropes.

There was no sign of a break-in, but the doors of the house were never locked anyway. The only signs of trouble were the dog’s broken chain and Sara’s crippled body.

Marshal Brownlow found Tom at work. He was sitting atop the little Gravely tractor, pulling a cart of green bricks, hauling them to the kiln, a thirty-foot tall dome-shaped oven heated by coal.

Tom looked up from his tractor and saw the marshal and his foreman walking toward him. The foreman waved a hand and Tom shut the tractor engine. He sensed death in the air. Hours later, he could still recall the peculiar smell. Something was stuck in his nose as he stood up from the tractor seat.

Brownlow said, “We need you to come with us to the office. Something’s happened to Sara, and we need to talk to you about it right now.”

“What happened, Donald? What in the hell happened?” Tom asked. “Did she get into a wreck or something?”

“It would be better if we talked at the office. Let’s go over yonder,” the marshal said, motioning for Tom to follow.

As they walked quickly toward the building where the business was run, Tom asked, “What’s going on? Is she alive?”

“Barely,” the marshal said.

Once inside the foreman’s office, which was nothing more than a glorified shack, the marshal told him what had happened. He described the bedroom scene as Corrine had found it.

Tom cried out in anger, pounding his right fist in his left palm. The marshal drove him over to the hospital in his patrol car, and Tom fought back tears the whole way. How did his well-ordered life and family fall into such a tragedy? He wondered what they’d done to bring on such a curse as he prayed for his wife.

The Pickleyville hospital room was humid, almost water-damp. When Tom saw his wife, she was not dead but narrowly hanging on to life. Her face was drawn to one side as if stricken by a palsy. Sara was in a semi-coma, but she wasn’t placid or still. Instead, she was restless, appearing as though she was being assaulted in her sleep, often wide-eyed but focusing on nothing, constantly kicking off her sheets. She had to be restrained with leather straps at the wrists and feet.

She was blinded by the darkness of her own mind, a war taking place in her soul that manifested itself in the current struggles. And the doctor had little conclusive information to tell the family, a prognosis as mysterious as the attack.

Tom sat at her bedside for a few moments before the nurses made him leave. In the hallway outside of the ward, he offered his simple prayers, the same petitions of men through all time, the prayers of anyone traveling a dark wood, those who faced senseless damage and gratuitous evil. He tried to make sense of his broken world but the heavens were brass, and nothing came back from his petitions but the echo of his own voice.

Sara, thirty-six years old, was a pretty woman. She was slim and strong with long auburn hair, and not one white strand in it. Now her hair was matted and stringy, her face swollen almost twice its normal size.

The new preacher at Little Zion Methodist arrived at the hospital. Reverend Charlie Poole stood in the hallway, put his hand on Tom’s shoulder and hung his head, saying few words.

Tom’s cousin’s wife, Martina, picked up Wesley from school. The boy did not know what happened other than his mother was in the hospital and that he could not go back home.

James Luke had been off work on Monday from his job at the highway department, but nobody could find him, and Nelda was at the bank in Pickleyville where she worked as a teller. She’d heard the news within a half an hour of Sara’s admission to the hospital ER. Her boss allowed her to leave work early, and she went directly to the hospital.

During the time Sara suffered at the Ninth Ward Hospital, Wesley worked with a handsaw and hammer, building a birdhouse out of scrap lumber in Martina and Sid Hardin’s backyard. He was always building something with wood, drawing sketches of things around the farm and forest, oftentimes helping his father with projects on the home place. He’d won a blue ribbon at the parish fair in Ruthberry for an oil painting of their barn. Now he sat beneath a Chinaberry tree and cut boards while holding them steady on the wooden table. After he was done sawing, he concentrated on keeping the boards secure while nailing together the sides of the little birdhouse with a rusty claw hammer. Boyhood was its own balm, its own natural protection against the blows and hardness of the surrounding adult world. When he looked at the finished birdhouse, he couldn’t wait to show his mother and father.

At the hospital in Pickleyville, Tom longed for his wife’s healing. The only consolation to her injuries was that she was still alive and breathing on her own, which offered him some hope. She lay there broken, her body crippled by the attack. Tom sat outside the ward in the hallway. The smell of ammonia was in the air. Though he appreciated Nelda and the preacher’s presence, he could find little comfort in it.

His thoughts raged. He needed to find the man who’d left his wife for dead. But his heart was at odds, torn between health and vengeance, an ungracious emotion that left him in anguish. He knew if he could get his hands around the neck of the man who did this to his wife, he’d offer no quarter. And in his mind he had only one possible suspect: Sloan Parnell.

“You want any coffee?” Reverend Poole asked.

“Yes,” Tom said, waking from the nightmare ever so briefly.

“Let’s go get us some. The coffee’s down the hall.”

So the two men walked the corridor to the hospital cafeteria and drank for a half an hour. After they finished the coffee, the pastor prayed with Tom for his wife’s restoration and strength to weather this calamity through the mercy of God.

Four days later, Sara was out of the coma but still in the hospital. The doctors said in time she would recuperate, though her shoulder was broken and there were other injuries to her face and genitalia. She could barely speak. Several of her teeth had been knocked out during the attack, and she was struck with an inexplicable palsy on one side of her face.

She claimed to have no memory of the attack. No images. Nothing. Her speech was staccato. “I can’t—uh—uh—re—mem—ber—any—thing,” she told Tom.

“That’s okay, honey, rest,” he said. For some reason he could not pin down, Tom doubted her complete memory lapse. But he was not a cruel man, and he did not want to press her for details. He wished he didn’t have to work at the brickyard. Had he been at home when the predator arrived, he could have defended her. Tom asked for a second week off from work, which was granted with pay, something he didn’t expect.

Corrine came to the hospital to sit with Sara, even though Tom was available to stay. Tom went to town and bought a new GE television set, and he got James Luke to help him put it in the living room where it awaited Sara’s return home. Tom climbed a sweet gum tree in the backyard, thirty feet up, and installed an antenna to get decent reception.

Marshal Brownlow stopped by the Hardin home that evening. He brought a casserole wrapped in tinfoil that his wife had sent over. Despite the friction over the forest fires, Brownlow seemed to be genuinely concerned about the fate of this family in his jurisdiction. By contrast, the Baxter Parish Sheriff’s Office hadn’t shown any interest in the case whatsoever. Rarely did the sheriff do anything south of Liberty City unless there was a fierce public outcry, and he did even less in the Ninth Ward, which had its own marshal and special dedicated tax to pay for the office. The sheriff’s main base was in Ruthberry and the north end of the parish where his supporters lived, his chief campaign funders being the old-money landowners. Some of these families had been in power for more than a century.

The marshal’s office could perform any police work in the ward, as well as handling civil papers and security for the Ninth Ward Court in Milltown. Sometimes it seemed that the marshal served as the only real law in the Ninth Ward.

“You got any idea about who did this to my wife?” Tom asked the marshal. He and Brownlow stood outside on the front porch.

The marshal smoked. “Not any leads or suspects. Nothing at all. We got the state police to fingerprint the house, but not a thing’s come of it so far,” the marshal said.

“I want you to go see Sloan Parnell. I had to knock the hell out of him over at Beam’s feed store a couple of weeks ago.”

“And you don’t like him so you think he’d go and rape your wife? Come on, Tom. That’s a far stretch.” He snuffed out the cigarette on the porch post and tossed the butt into the yard.

“He’s Judge Parnell’s grandson, and he’s marked with a real bad seed. What’s wrong? Are you scared of him?”

“I ain’t scared of no man.”

“You’re full of shit. Every man is scared of somebody.”

“I’ll look into it.”

“You’d better. I might have to go visit him myself one night soon if you don’t.”

“Tom, you’d do well to stay away from him, if you know what’s good for you.”

“I’ve already said it once, and I’ll say it again. My hog dog was loose. He broke his chain on the day of the attack. I’d bet a hundred-dollar bill whoever attacked my wife had a patch of skin bit out of his ass.” Tom pointed to Jubal where he lay under the tree in the dirt, a thick chain hooked to his big leather collar. The sun was almost down, and the dog seemed to watch the men out of the corner of his eye. Jubal’s coat was red-brown like a rich roux and spotted with black, crimson, and white splotches. He had one glass eye that was blue and the other was mud-brown, and his overall build was more in line with a bulldog than a Catahoula. He wasn’t an anxious or barking dog, never making much noise around the house, and the other cur dogs were kept far past the barn in a series of net wire pens, but Jubal was always chained near the front of the house under a shade tree to serve as a deterrent to trespassers. If he had broken loose, he would have nailed any stranger who entered the yard planning mischief. Tom believed this fervently. The chain was snapped near his collar for a specific reason, and Tom knew the dog broke the chain to protect his wife.

“Well, it’s just another thing to look into,” said the marshal.

“I’ve already told your assistant Wentworth, and I also spoke to a deputy sheriff in Ruthberry by the name of Roberts.”

Brownlow looked away, toward the road. He didn’t say anything.

“My best guess is the son of a bitch that did this has a big patch of skin missing out of his ass or leg or arm or somewhere from trying to fight off the dog. Jubal’ll bite the fire out of anybody except me and my wife and boy, James Luke and Nelda Cate, Corrine Travis, and maybe Martina and Sid Hardin. That’s about it. He tries to bite folks, and that’s why I keep him on the logging chain when I’m not able to watch him close.”

“Like I told you, I’ll look into it.”

“You do that.”

The sky was gray and dark, as if the clouds were begging to rain. It was Sunday afternoon. Tom and Wesley had dressed for the church services earlier in the day, but Tom decided against going.

He walked to the open backdoor and looked down at the boy who was rubbing Jubal’s ears. Wesley rubbed the dog’s head and he seemed pleased, his tail wagging. The boy sat on the back steps dressed in a pair of khaki trousers and a khaki shirt like an aged farmer.

Tom stared down at the boy and remembered how he and Sara didn’t think they’d be able to have a child of their own. After they’d been married two years and no pregnancy occurred, they went to see a doctor in Pickleyville. The doctor said Tom was almost completely sterile. It was scarcely possible that they’d ever conceive. But then after their third year of marriage, they had a son, and he saw it as a miracle from God, evidence of the Lord’s graciousness and answered prayer.

 “When will Mother come home?” Wesley asked.

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after,” Tom said.

“Is Aunt Corrine going to stay at the hospital with her tonight?”

“Yes, she’s there now. Then I’ll relieve her for a while later, and afterward she’ll come back and stay there for the night.”

“Can I go with you to the hospital?”

“No, they won’t let you go into the room.”

“Why?”

“You’re too young. I’ve already covered this ground with you about the hospital rules.”

“Pops, who hurt her?”

Tom was startled. This was the first indication that Wesley knew something truly dreadful had happened to his mother, and she was not simply ill. “Where did you hear that somebody hurt her?”

“School. I heard Mrs. Maxine Bennett whispering to Mrs. Jennings.”

Tom wondered exactly how much he knew. “I’m not sure, and neither is the marshal, though I have a suspect.”

“Who?”

“I can’t say.”

“You need to say, Pops.”

“No,” Tom said.

“We need to figure this out.”

He could see the boy beginning to cry, tears sliding down his face. “I need to figure it out. But this is not your concern.” He reached down and hugged the boy, held him against his chest for a few seconds.

It started to drizzle. Drops of rain fell across their shirts. “Let’s go inside before we get wet. And I’ll go put Jubal back on his chain,” Tom said to the boy.

Tom had sold a few more hogs that he’d caught by baiting them with corn at Junior Cooper’s catch pen deep in the piney woods. The homemade trapdoor gate worked like a dream, but he realized the process of catching the mavericks was going to get harder and slower over time. He needed the money to recoup some of his livestock investment, not to mention the hospital bills coming home like a second assault. The deadline for removing the hogs from the rangeland was December 31st, and it was always on his mind, a foreboding date haunting him.

Before the attack, he’d planned to buy more tools for his carpentry work, a planer and a wood lathe, a big band saw and a drill press. Perhaps he’d start doing odd jobs and fix-it projects for cash money when he wasn’t at the brickyard, now that the livestock business was becoming dead to the past. However, the estimated two-thousand-dollar hospital bill he now faced would flag any attempt at investing in an at-home shop. The surgery left pins in Sara’s shoulder and arm, and the time in the hospital cost money that he didn’t have readily available. The Hardins didn’t have insurance, and their savings account at the bank wasn’t enough to cover the bills. Tom needed to sell the remaining hogs. So far, he’d only earned four hundred dollars from the hogs and cattle he’d sold, but a number of hogs were still running wild in the woods.

The day Sara returned home, she was a shell of her former self. Her face was still swollen and drawn to the right side, and several of her teeth were missing. Her left eye was bloodshot and her vision blurry. The pain was unceasing. Her broken shoulder was in a brace, and she could hardly walk because of poor balance, but at least she was home, back to the house where she’d lived since shortly after their marriage. Yet this was little comfort since it was also the place where she had been left for dead. Often, she just sat on the couch and wept, drying her tears with her dress. The new television screen showed the gray images of the Baton Rouge station, WBRZ, but she didn’t really watch it. Sara never even acknowledged the television set. When she heard footsteps nearing the room, she would cower, trying to hide. Then she’d go stiff as a corpse until she understood who was approaching.

Perhaps the worst of it was the cold shame of the attack, the rape itself. How could the family speak of rape? There were no adequate words for the attack on the homemaker, mother, and wife. Truth be told, Tom and Sara never really talked about anything beyond trivial matters—daily activities and books. Words had not come to them to address the anguish and sense of violation. Silence was its own punishment, and it continued to force more pain on the broken Hardin family like some kind of cosmic millstone crushing them into powder, grinding each of them into the dirt.