Zion (7 page)

It surprised Tom how he prospered after removing the hogs and cattle from the woods. The world was changing, and he changed along with it. For seven years he had worked at the local junior college as a journeyman carpenter, and served for the past three years as the foreman of the shop. Sara worked across campus at the library, having begun her job in August 1965, several years before he took the position at the college. Tom worked at the Ponderosa, a maintenance complex based in and around a giant Quonset hut that had been salvaged from World War II surplus. The shop was named after the home of Ben Cartwright’s ranch on Bonanza. As a civil servant, Tom gave an honest day’s work for a day’s pay. As a carpenter, he worked at the college but was never really a part of the town and gown. More than once he discussed with his wife the possibility of completing his associate’s degree, but he hated to submit himself to the arrogant professors, who came in two varieties: those who held maintenance workers in contempt and those who did not even recognize their existence as human beings. He was willing to work for them, but not study under them.

Monday, May 20, 1974, was Tom’s fiftieth birthday. Sara had made him a German chocolate cake and brought it over to the shop for lunch to share it with the men who worked there. Harvey Shaffer, a carpenter, brought fresh fillet catfish and fried them on a propane cooker outside the building, the fish turning golden brown in the big black skillet. Hours later, Tom was still full from the hearty meal.

Dub Freeman, a student worker, helped Tom steady a sheet of plywood. They stood at the table saw in the Quonset hut. It was hot inside the metal building, even with two five-foot tall fans blowing at each end of the shop. In front of them lay the sheet of plywood he was trying to cut, ripping it down the middle with a ten-inch table saw blade. Tom flipped the switch to the electric motor on the saw. The blade whirled, and it screamed when it entered the wood, the sound stinging his ears. He was careful to make the cut smooth, keeping the plywood as steady and as tight as he could on the big table. He was aware that a careless move could cost him a finger or worse.

After it was split down the middle, he placed one of the pieces on the back of a frame he’d built for a professor’s bookshelf. He was fashioning this solid, functional shelf for a faculty member’s office in Rayburn Hall. He wished he had the budget to buy oak or perhaps birch, which stained nicely, instead of this god-awful pine, but he did the best he could with the materials the college could afford.

Because he was such a meticulously detailed man, he served as the lead cabinetmaker at the shop, and during his off-duty time, he was a handyman and general carpenter for the junior college faculty and staff in their private residences. Not long after taking the position at the college, he converted his old horse and cow barn into a shop. This was where he now worked on projects at night and on weekends. He no longer had any cattle, hogs, horses, or chickens on the place, and he didn’t even own a dog. Jubal had died of old age five years earlier, and Tom had long ago forsaken the hunting and farming he used to do until the mid-1960s. From time to time, he’d plant a garden, but he hadn’t planted anything in several seasons.

Wesley, who was now twenty, worked alongside his father on projects at home, and he was essential to keeping their little business going. Soon to graduate from the junior college himself, he studied nearly free on his father and mother’s staff tuition exemption, which covered everything but his textbook rental and lab fees each semester. Now he was planning to study architecture at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette. It was his dream to become a professional architect, a designer and builder of homes and businesses, schools and churches. The university was a hundred miles away, and going to the university would mean he could no longer help with his father’s projects. Tom said he planned to cut back on his outside work as a result, knowing he couldn’t do any large jobs without Wesley’s help.

At closing time, the carpentry crew left the Quonset hut and punched the time clock with paper cards. Tom turned off the lights and pulled down the big garage doors and locked up the shop. He was at the tail end of the line of men leaving the Ponderosa, the time clock made a loud cha-punt sound as he placed the card into the slot for the stamp. It read 16:34 in faded blue ink. He dropped the card into a slot on the steel cardholder at the end of a long hallway in the main administrative building near North Oak Street.

“Have a good weekend and happy birthday, Tom,” Shaffer said.

Tom thanked him for the catfish meal, and they walked to their trucks. Dust billowed as the vehicles left the parking lot in a line entering the street.

He was not going directly home but to the Claiborne House in downtown Pickleyville. It was Dr. Howell Claiborne’s family residence. Tom and Wesley were to meet with him about a project, designing and building a home study. He knew that Dr. Claiborne had left the junior college administration under a dark cloud. Most everyone at the college had heard about his affair with Charity LeBlanc during his wife Eliza’s prolonged illness.

Tom also remembered Charity from the 1960s. She ran with men in town, business men and the local Sicilian mafia, even dated Sloan Parnell. Tom guessed that she was in her early thirties now, and he’d seen her on campus twice in months past.

The rumor mill said that the president had retired because of three consecutive scandals. First, he started the indiscretions with Charity and moved her into his old family home downtown while his wife of more than forty years was in the hospital for a surgery. Second, a short time after his wife died of a subsequent stroke, he married Charity in Nevada, the dirt hardly settled on his first wife’s grave. And third, Charity brought him to shame by carousing with faculty men as a newlywed, the worst scandal occurring not a month after their Las Vegas wedding and extended honeymoon in Japan.

The president’s new wife got caught by campus security having sexual relations with an English professor in his campus office. A night security guard was making his rounds checking locked doors for the evening when he happened upon them. Part of the tale that made the story more scandalous was that the male college faculty member in question was widely believed to be a homosexual, and this added plenty of satire to the whole fiasco. Dr. Claiborne was sixty-six years old and healthy, not ready to retire, but he was forced to resign by the college trustees in order to avoid a very public termination hearing based on Charity’s antics.

The woman had moved up in the world as the new wife of the “retired” president of Baxter State Junior College. Dr. Claiborne was a man more than thirty years her senior and the son of a United States Congressman from the early part of the century. The house they lived in after being kicked out of the campus mansion was a two and a half story place in Pickleyville, the stately Claiborne family home that was once owned by the demagogic politician.

Dr. Claiborne and his first wife had been prominent members of the Federated Presbyterian Church a block away from the old Claiborne House, and Charity joined the church soon after their marriage. Dr. Claiborne was an elder and a member of the church session, a ruling board for the congregation, and his first wife had played the organ for services and was a conservatory-trained musician.

Tom was uneasy, even though he liked the old man well enough and agreed to come and talk to him about the job when he’d called the Ponderosa. Dr. Claiborne hired both Tom and Sara years ago, and he had a measure of loyalty to the man for that reason alone.

Wesley was going to meet his father at the old Claiborne House. He was nearly finished with his associate’s degree with a double major in art and drafting. He had only one class to finish, a shop-based independent study project for graduating students during the summer session. Wesley’s degree requirements would be completed by the first week of August, though he wouldn’t be able to walk at commencement until December. The young man was adept at drafting, and he was more than able to work as a journeyman carpenter as well, especially as a cabinetmaker and finish carpenter. At the meeting with Dr. Claiborne, they needed to find out what the old man had in mind, to start a discussion of what the project would entail in order to offer an accurate bid on materials and labor. Wesley’s primary role was to render a model for the project with specifications, and his father would provide the bid and on-site supervision. They’d work together on the project at their little home-based shop in Zion.

As Tom drove to the Heller-Reid neighborhood where Dr. Claiborne lived, he passed houses on city streets under a canopy of hardwood trees, the foliage green and rich. He thought about his son and the promise of additional schooling in Lafayette. An architecture degree would make him a white collar worker for the rest of his life. Regardless of what he might learn at USL, Tom knew that Wesley had the practical expertise necessary in carpentry and the building trades to be successful, and that this would give him an edge over students with only book-learning. Tom, on the other hand, didn’t have Wesley’s artistic and drafting skills, a disadvantage that the boy helped him overcome in their work together. He might have to hire a part-time helper after Wesley left for college, though his son promised to work on weekends and during school breaks. But Tom realized that Lafayette over in Acadiana would be a whole new experience, something different from living at home and going to the nearby junior college. He’d miss his son and companion in the carpentry business, though he wished him great success.

When Tom stopped his truck in front of the big Claiborne House, he saw Wesley’s two-door Ford Maverick coming toward him on the street. Wesley pulled in front of him toward the curb and they parked nose to nose.

Tom was pleased that Wesley had arrived on time. Tom had always found the president a nervous fellow who didn’t quite know what to do with himself, and he didn’t want to make the old man wait and have to spend much idle time chatting. He hoped Dr. Claiborne’s new wife wouldn’t be around. They got out of their vehicles and met on the sidewalk.

“Did you bring your sketch pad?” Tom asked. He gestured to Wesley’s big portfolio under his arm on a strap over his shoulder. Inside he carried pencils, as well as plenty of examples of their work with some drawings.

“Yes, sir. It helps to keep track of what the paying customer wants,” Wesley said, sounding like a student in the Commerce Department at the junior college. He wore thick sideburns like little brown lamb chops, but his hair barely touched the collar of his shirt. He was in many ways the physical equal to his father. However, he stood three inches taller, and was just as wiry and strong, quick and fast as Tom. Wesley ran cross country in high school and could have done the same at the junior college had he wanted to try out. Wesley’s bell bottom jeans were worn but not ratty, and they covered his leather shoes. His belt was tight around his waist, and his clothes fit his frame. He was meticulously clean, conservative for the times.

The pair eased up the brick walkway toward the house, a large white colonial with lap siding. Gas lamps lit the sides of the front door to cause a dull illuminated glow around the red entryway.

Tom knocked on the door, three steady wraps with his knuckles. He waited a moment. Before he could tap on the door again, it opened wide. There stood Charity LeBlanc Claiborne smiling. She wore a linen gown that showed her pointed breasts, the split up the thigh revealing her shapely leg.

“Welcome gentlemen,” she said.

“We’re here to see your husband,” Tom said. He was trying his best to hide his antipathy toward her. He did not trust this woman and did not like entertaining her presence.

“I’ll be handling this project, Tommy. Dr. Claiborne is at a history conference in Nashville at Vanderbilt, and then he’s coming home for the pre-Memorial Day picnic at Baxter State, and directly afterward he’s going to spend time doing research at the Library of Congress in Washington for most of the summer. He’s doing some research for a book he’s writing. As a matter of fact, he wanted me to go with him, but I have so many important projects here in town that I needed to stay,” she said.

They stood awkwardly at the door. Wesley looked at his father.

In an instant, Tom made a decision—one that he realized he might regret later. “Ma’am, I was supposed to see Dr. Claiborne today, and I planned to work with him on the project at his request. But if he is out until the picnic, then I suppose it’ll be a few days before we can get back together on it. Please let him know I came here today, and I’ll come back at his leisure,” Tom said, watching her for a reaction.

Charity’s mouth screwed as tight as a prune all of a sudden. “Well, Tommy, I suppose we’ll need to find us a new carpenter, won’t we? Damn you.” She stepped back and slammed the door in their faces, the heavy wooden door closing so fast and hard that the frame rattled and the gas luminaries flickered.

“Well, I guess it’s time to go home,” Tom said, resigned. He turned toward the brick walkway and the automobiles.

“Pops, don’t you think that was a little harsh?” Wesley said.

“Harsh? I don’t think I was rude. I said ‘ma’am’ and never raised my voice. I tried to tell her I’d come back as politely as I could.”

“That was easily a thousand-dollar project, and I need the money for the year at school.”

“We can handle the tuition money.”

They walked back to their vehicles parked at the curb.

“Dang it, Pops, what’s wrong with this job?”

“That woman is a blight on the soul of this town, and I don’t want anything to do with her. Not if I can help it, and I suspect that I can help it.”

“That’s it, then?”

“As far as I’m concerned, it is.”

The next day was Tuesday, and Marshal Donald Brownlow sat in his office chain-smoking, drumming his thumb on the edge of his ink blotter, his oak desk cluttered with duties that he was putting off. He’d marked the days in red ink on the calendar. He picked up his cigarette from the ashtray and took two quick drags, and then crushed it. The brown ashtray was shaped like a bloodhound’s head with long ears. It was a gift from his wife, something she bought for him on vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, a few years earlier. He was stalling, brooding, thinking, allowing a woman he did not want to see to cool her heels in the front office with his secretary. It was ten minutes after twelve, and he had failed to get lunch. The woman had been in the building for at least fifteen minutes.

He buzzed his secretary on the intercom. “Mrs. Lott, please send her on in,” he said.

“Yes, Marshal,” she said over the speaker.

He lit a new cigarette with his Zippo and did not stand when the woman entered the room. He motioned for her to sit. Brownlow was keenly aware of her reputation. As a result, he was guarded, as if a hungry weasel had just entered the chicken yard and he was a plump hen.

“Glad you could find time to see me as busy as you must be today. I had a real urgent need to speak with you this afternoon,” Charity Claiborne said.

“Shame to hear about your father. I offer my deepest condolences,” the marshal said. He noticed her blouse was unbuttoned at least two slots lower than what was respectable. She was the daughter of the infamous philandering Church of God preacher, Brother Penrose LeBlanc, a full gospel minister who was, by all accounts, an unredeemed rascal, a parson well known to prey on women in his congregation. Local folks speculated that he’d been molesting Charity and her sister along with other women in his church for decades. Penrose had died earlier in the year. The marshal hadn’t gone to the funeral, though he did read the obituary in the Pickleyville
Star-Register
.

“He died peacefully in his bed. Sugar diabetes pursued him almost from the gates of hell,” she said. “But praise God, because of his death, I have been saved and rebaptized. The Apostle Thad Hussert at the Flaming Sword Church laid hands on me, and I now have the Holy Ghost for the first time in my life. Like Daddy always said, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground, it can’t flower and grow.” She stared at the marshal.

“Well,” he said, unsure how to comment on her new-found faith. Brownlow had been diagnosed with diabetes recently. He was taking shots in the stomach, and his eyes were ailing from high blood sugar. Right then he was having trouble focusing. The edges around Charity’s face seemed fuzzy.

“My Lord, it’s real smoky in this place,” she said.

The marshal crushed his newly lit Winston cigarette in the ashtray. “Ma’am, why are you here today?” He didn’t mean to be abrupt, but he took note of his own sternness of voice. “As you said yourself, I’m busy and need to get back to my work.”

“Marshal Brownlow, I’m here because I have a confession to make. Something that has been gnawing at me for almost ten years. When I was saved, the Apostle Hussert said to get everything right before man, so my sins can be right before the Lord, and I’m here with you for that very reason.”

He felt a shot of pain in his back, a sharp jab. His lower back was a source of chronic antagonism, almost like a bad deed done in the past now returning to haunt him, and it was getting worse lately. He felt assaulted from all fronts: from the diabetes, herniated disks in his back, and high blood pressure. He felt flushed in his face. He waited for her to speak again.

“Ten years ago, I made some telephone calls that I believe might have led to a person’s death. It was Sloan Parnell, Judge Parnell’s grandson. We used to run together, date a little. We had a very jealous relationship, him and me. Uh, marshal, you mind if I smoke?”

“I thought it bothered you.”

“It does, but I really need a cigarette.”

He offered her his pack, but she waved him off. She retrieved a pack of Kool Filter King cigarettes from her purse along with a lighter. She lit a cigarette and exhaled out of the side of her mouth.

“Please go on,” the marshal said. “Like I said, I have some business to attend to.” He leaned forward and put his hands on the desk, attempting to ease his back pain.

“I called you in November or December of 1964. It was about Sloan Parnell and Sara Hardin’s attack. I said that Sloan was involved, but he wasn’t alone. Not at all. Like I said, we used to run together. Do some drugs and drink liquor. Nothing serious, just a little whiskey and pills. I came to find out that Sloan was seeing Sara Hardin on the sly, and she was seeing other men besides her jackass of an old man, Tommy. I was only seeing one man, just Sloan. But she was seeing Sloan and James Luke Cate, too. Sloan got drunk one night and told me he was two-timing me with Sara Hardin. I got real pissed, and it kind of got out of hand. I called James Luke Cate at work and told him what was happening, and before long James Luke Cate tried to kill Sara and beat her almost to death. I called Tom and said Sloan did it to his wife, just to set a little trouble in motion. I always liked to see the pot stirred, and I know the Lord forgave me for it when I got born again. The last time I saw Sloan, he told me he believed Tom burned down his house and all the young pine trees he had planted out there. He was mortally afraid, scared to death. He told me he believed he was a marked man and that Tom Hardin was trying to kill him,” she paused a moment and took a deep drag from the menthol.

She exhaled smoke and continued her story. “Anyway, I believe Tom and James Luke killed Sloan after I called. I’d wager James Luke baited Tom into going after Sloan and maybe they faked it all like it was a bad accident. I know this sounds kind of strange, but it’s how it happened. All because I made some anonymous phone calls. I feel so bad about it now.” She took another pull and blew a slim line of smoke above her forehead.

“Ma’am, you’re a born liar,” the marshal said, remembering the details of the rape, and Parnell’s death, even the anonymous phone call. “You’re just a bold-faced liar. The case is closed shut. And if you think I believe this horseshit about some kind of love triangle with Sara Hardin and Jim Cate, you’re beyond damn crazy, pardon my French. Tom Hardin a murderer? You’re plumb goofy and ought to go see a head doctor.”

The woman’s face turned crimson. She crushed her cigarette into the ashtray. The butt had a lipstick mark as red as her face. She left it circling in a whiff of smoke in the marshal’s ashtray. “You’ll do well to listen to me, if you know your place,” she said.

“I won’t listen to another damn word of it.” The marshal stood from his desk, stiff in his back and legs, his knees hurting from perennial gout. He loomed over Charity with an intense anger that overshadowed her. “This is the devil’s own nonsense, Mrs. Claiborne. I don’t have no more time to throw away on your craziness. But have a nice afternoon.” He walked to the door without speaking and gestured with his hand for her to leave.

She gathered her purse from the floor beside her chair and stood abruptly, staring the marshal in the face. She was tall and fine-looking, somewhat intimidating and intense. “If you don’t bring these men to justice, then I’ll go visit Judge Parnell myself. You do recall his family estate burned? His grandson was killed. Me and the judge have a long friendship going way back. Do you hear me, lard ass? Don’t dare underestimate me. I’ll help clean your clock come election time. We’ll get somebody else elected in your place,” she said, a look of scorn on her face.

“Lady, to start with, there’s nothing to investigate here. And if there was, you’d be the first one I’d need to interrogate and throw into a jail cell. That and I’m planning to retire from this office next year, so I don’t give a dog’s damn about the judge and his old money. I don’t have to deal with rich politicians or squirrelly women like you anymore. So please don’t let the front door hit you in the rear end, Mrs. Claiborne. But do try to have a real nice day,” he said.

The woman shook her head in anger and hurried past the secretary and toward the door, her heels clicking on the terrazzo floor as she walked.

“Marshal,” Rita Lott said as Charity left the building, “I don’t believe she left here happy.”

Brownlow looked at his secretary from his office door. He seemed quizzical, one side of his mouth almost grinning. “No ma’am, I don’t reckon she was happy at all.”

The rest of the afternoon, Brownlow and Mrs. Lott looked through the Ninth Ward Marshal’s Office general file and junk room, hunting for anything on Sara Hardin and Sloan Parnell. It was late May, humid beyond words and scorching hot. The file room and storage, mildewing in the back of the marshal’s headquarters, had no air conditioner. After a half an hour of moving boxes of Christmas decorations, a tinfoil Christmas tree, as well as various ephemera, they found the box of files from 1964. The two of them were perspiring. The marshal sweated profusely, almost unnaturally. He looked like a Hereford bull in the summer sun. His back tortured him to such a degree that he felt faint.

“Marshal Brownlow,” Mrs. Lott said, “you’re lucky I don’t cuss.” She wiped her forehead with a napkin, a line of sweat and dirt at her hairline.

“Your dedication is always appreciated,” he told her. He looked at her blue blouse, which was dusty, almost gray with grime. “Put a dollar or two extra in your check to dry clean your clothes.”

“I will,” she said, not offering the slightest thank-you.

The marshal stayed after closing time. At five o’clock Mrs. Lott left for the day. His old notes were written with a black fountain pen, and they jogged his memory well enough. But despite this reunion with the past, there were no real leads in the file. Nothing new. Police work was less advanced in 1964, he reasoned. The coroner’s report on Sloan Parnell said his neck was broken at the third cervical vertebra. No other trauma was visible except for what appeared to be a laceration on his face from tree limbs in the cow pasture, and a compound fracture on his upper arm, the bone struck through the skin. No other noticeable damages were noted.

No matter how hard he tried, he did not understand this woman, Charity LeBlanc Claiborne. Why dredge this up? Why now?

In his many years in office, even as a deputy marshal before being elected the marshal himself, he had known that guilt could work on someone’s insides. Under the pressure, people might make guilt-induced confessions. However, he didn’t see in Charity’s eyes an inclination toward guilt. Sins of the flesh were a matter of course for her, but a visit to a lawman to recall tales was not the typical outgrowth of her nature, especially with the implication that other people had done the crimes, and she was the innocent trigger to all of the death and destruction. This woman seemed like a special case all to herself, and her set of motives were all her own.

Before him were the old files, mere scraps. But he needed to make something of them, so he continued studying them like a worn copy of the Bible. It occurred to him that his whole career was made up of such scraps, and with these scraps he fashioned a life’s work. From his experience as a peace officer, few people ever gave the whole truth and nothing but the truth—at least if they were somehow connected to a breach of the law. Even honest people offered only partial truth at such times. Many folks lied to him out of general principle even when they had no dog in the fight. He came to realize that obstruction of justice was routine, a way of doing business in Baxter Parish and elsewhere. There was an old principle that he learned early in his work: If folks are talking to the police, they’re guilty of lying until proven innocent. Nine times out of ten, the principle was gospel true, he thought. It was a shame, but that was all he had to work with. He had to make sense of things and do his job despite the common deception.

The marshal placed the files in his top left desk drawer, the spot where he kept a pint bottle of gin to knock the edge off the occasional stress of his work, diabetes be damned. He locked the building and left into the late evening sun, traveling toward his home a mile away. But he changed his mind and turned around near the driveway and headed toward the interstate to leave the south end of the parish. He drove north to Pickleyville, a Winston cigarette dangling from his fingers, his hand resting on the patrol car door, the smoke trailing out of the cracked window.

Then he turned off I-55 and headed east on Highway 190 toward Pickleyville. He drove to the new shopping center where Radio Shack sat in one corner of the new Town and Gown Shopping Plaza. He parked in the asphalt lot. The marshal felt tired from digging in the storage room files, from heaving box after box of cases long closed. When he got out of the patrol car, he dropped a spent cigarette on the ground and smeared it flat with a boot heel.

Across the lot he saw a blue pickup truck squeal its tires like it was on a racetrack, careening onto 190. He reached for the car door as if to pursue the truck, but he immediately relented, reminding himself that this was not his jurisdiction. The ward he was duly elected to serve was several miles to the south.

Brownlow walked into the store to buy a cassette tape recorder. The electronics clerk said a particular machine was a good one, the premium grade, a portable recorder. Normally, he would have sent his deputy, Freddy Wentworth, or Mrs. Lott to buy the item, but today he decided to take care of it himself, and had come up with a strategy on his own for dealing with Charity Claiborne’s little challenge, and he wanted to keep his plans as quiet as possible. He needed to get folks on tape immediately.

He paid for the tape recorder with petty cash, just under one hundred dollars. He thanked the cashier and walked out of the store with the box under his arm. He placed an unlit cigarette in his lips as he went to the patrol car.

But the hot parking lot seemed even warmer now than when he was working in the storage room fighting file boxes. The sun was lower. He knew it couldn’t be any hotter. Yet it felt like the kind of heat that will trick the eye, as if the asphalt was molten at a distance, mirage-like, and sweat gathered in his hair and neck and around his collar all of a sudden. He noticed that his shirt at the armpits was soaked. He began to feel nauseated, his throat thick. A hard panic engulfed him. Air was difficult to take into his mouth. He wanted to vomit or fall to the ground. He began staggering and almost lost control of the cardboard box under his arm. He dropped the unlit cigarette from his mouth, which hit the asphalt. He lumbered a few more steps to the car and placed the box haltingly on the roof. He grasped the car’s warm steel with both palms.