One Foot in Eden Read online

  Mrs. Winchester sat on her front porch. I knew she’d been there a while, waiting for Holland or me to show up. I took off my hat and stepped onto the porch. I remembered seeing her when I was a boy and thinking how pretty she’d been with her long, black hair, her eyes dark as mahogany wood. She couldn’t be more than fifty-two or three, but her hair was gray as squirrel fur now, her face furrowed like an overworked field. Only her eyes looked the same, deep brown like her son’s.

  Those eyes didn’t blink when she spoke. Except for her mouth, her face was so rigid it could have been on a daguerreotype.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Mrs. Winchester said. ‘My boy is dead.’

  There was such finality in her voice I expected her to get up and lead me to Holland’s body.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I asked when she didn’t say or do anything else.

  ‘I heard the shot. I didn’t think nothing of it at first but when Holland didn’t come in for his noon-dinner I knew it certain as I’m sitting on this here porch.’

  Her face didn’t change, but for the first time grief and anger tinged her voice.

  ‘Billy Holcombe’s done killed my boy.’

  ‘Why would Billy Holcombe want to do such a thing?’

  She didn’t answer that question, didn’t even try to. Ten years of experience told me there was more wouldn’t answer than couldn’t answer in her silence.

  I looked at some corn planted close to the house. A scarecrow leaned like a drunk above the puny stalks. The hat and straw that had shaped the seed-sack face lay on the ground. It didn’t matter. The drought had already taken anything the crows would want.

  ‘When’s the last time you seen Holland?’ I asked, meeting her eyes again.

  ‘This morning. I went out to feed the chickens. I come back and he was gone.’

  ‘And nobody came and picked him up?’

  ‘No, I’d a heard it if they’d of done so.’

  ‘And Holland didn’t say he was off to anywhere?’

  ‘You go see Billy Holcombe,’ Mrs. Winchester said. ‘He’s the one knows where Holland is.’

  Her eyes were stern and righteous, but I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. For a moment I wondered if maybe she had done something to Holland, but that didn’t seem likely. Everything I’d learned as a law man told me a mother who’d killed her grown child would have already confessed. She could have no more carried that burden inside her than I could have carried a baby inside me. What seemed likely was what Bobby had said. Holland was passed out somewhere drunk, someplace pretty close by since he hadn’t taken his truck.

  ‘I know the Holcombes is some kin to you,’ Mrs. Winchester said, and she let that hang in the air between us.

  ‘If he’s went and done something against the law that’ll make no difference,’ I said, slipping more and more into the way of speaking I’d grown up with.

  I put my hat back on.

  ‘I’m going to have me a look around. I’ll walk the river a ways and I’ll go see Billy Holcombe, but I ain’t accusing nobody of nothing yet. If Holland hasn’t showed by morning I’ll get a serious search going.’

  ‘He ain’t coming back,’ Mrs. Winchester said.

  She got up from the chair and went inside.

  I walked down to a river that drought had made more dry stones than water. A current that would have knocked a man down in April was now a trickle. I limped across the shore of rocks as I followed the river downstream. I shouted Holland’s name every so often, using what wind I had in my one good lung. But even if he wasn’t passed out drunk, he’d have a hard time hearing me. Cicadas filled the trees, loud and unceasing as a cotton mill’s weave room.

  I straddled a barbed wire fence and stepped onto Billy Holcombe’s land, land Billy had bought years back from Mrs. Winchester’s husband. I wondered if that had something to do with why I was up here—an argument over a boundary line. Plenty of blood had been spilled over such matters in Oconee County. But I was getting way ahead of myself. I didn’t even have a body yet.

  Billy’s tobacco pressed up close to the river. His rows were tight, no more than two feet apart., which meant more yield but the cultivating had to be done by hand. It was a good crop, bright green and tall, nothing like the tobacco in the fields I’d seen earlier. The river had saved him, soaking the soil so well in spring the roots still got moisture. Come fall he might be one of the few farmers in Jocassee with anything to cure in a tobacco barn.

  Billy Holcombe hoed at the opposite end of the row where I stood, Cousin Billy, though a good ways back. He was a good bit younger than me, so I hadn’t known him growing up, but I’d known his parents and older sister. All I remembered of him was that the first year I’d been down at Clemson College he’d gotten polio.

  His being the only person in Jocassee to get polio hadn’t been surprising, at least to the Holcombes’ neighbors. Bad luck followed his people like some mangy hound they couldn’t run off. His granddaddy and uncle had both owned farms at one time but lost them and ended up sharecropping for the Winchesters. They hadn’t been trifling men. They’d worked hard and didn’t drink, but it seemed the hail always fell hardest on the Holcombes’ crops. If lightning hit a barn in Jocassee or blackleg killed a cow, it most always belonged to a Holcombe.

  Billy’s back was to me. The cicadas sang so loud he probably hadn’t heard me calling Holland’s name. I waited for him to finish his row, remembering how it felt to hoe tobacco—how the sweat stung your eyes and your back stayed bent so long you felt by day’s end you’d need a crowbar to straighten yourself. I remembered how palms got rough as sandpaper and the back of your neck got red as brick and you’d get to the end of one row and keep your head down like a mule wearing blinders because you didn’t want to see how many more of those long rows you had left.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was knowing no matter how hard you worked, it might come to nothing. Even if the weather spared your crop, and that was a big if, you still had root knot and blue mold to worry about, not to mention bud worms and tobacco worms.

  Billy’s tobacco looked healthy, but even so he wasn’t home free yet. The hardest work came at harvest time. The tobacco gum turned your hands and arms brown as it stuck to your skin like pine resin. You had to string the leaves onto tobacco sticks and hang the sticks in the barn to cure. Even then a lightning strike or cigarette could set the barn on fire, and in five minutes nine months’ work would be nothing but smoke and ashes.

  Billy Holcombe knew all this better than I did, because it wasn’t memory for him. It was as much a part of Billy as his own shadow. But as I watched him finish his row I knew he couldn’t allow himself to think about how uncertain his livelihood was. To farm a man did have to act like a mule—keep his eyes and thoughts on the ground straight in front of him. If he didn’t he couldn’t keep coming out to his fields day after day.

  I walked into the field, stepping on clumps of dirt and weeds Billy’s hoe had turned up. That hoe rose and fell ahead of me, and despite myself it was like the hoe was in my hands, not his. For a few moments I could feel the worn oak handle smooth against my palms, could feel the hoe blade break the soil. Don’t pretend you miss such a life as this, I told myself.

  I didn’t speak until he’d finished his row. He turned and found me not five feet behind him. For the first time I wondered if Mrs. Winchester might have spoken the gospel truth, because Billy didn’t act at all surprised to see me.

  ‘How you doing, Sheriff?’ he said, meeting my eyes.

  He didn’t say What’s the matter? or Has something happened? He spoke as if we’d just bumped into each other in downtown Seneca, not the middle of his tobacco field.

  ‘I’m looking for Holland Winchester,’ I said, watching his blue eyes. ‘You seen him?’

  ‘No,’ Billy said.

  The eyes can lie, but eventually they’ll tell you the truth.

  When Billy said no he glanced at his clenched right hand. I knew what that meant because I’
d seen many another man do the same thing in such a situation. That right hand of Billy’s had helped lift rocks from his field big as watermelons. It had helped fell oak trees you couldn’t get your arms around. And maybe, just maybe, that hand had helped hold a shotgun steady enough to kilt a man.

  Billy Holcombe was looking for strength.

  But I wasn’t going to press him, not yet.

  ‘Well if you do see him,’ I said, ‘tell him he’s got his momma worried.’

  ‘I’ll do that, Sheriff.’

  Billy wiped his brow with the back of his hand. He was sweating from the hoeing, but I wondered if he had another reason to sweat.

  ‘If he doesn’t come home tonight I’ll bring some men with me in the morning,’ I told Mrs. Winchester. ‘We’ll search the woods and river, if we need to.’

  I wrote down my telephone number.

  ‘Here,’ I said, handing it to her. ‘You call if Holland comes in tonight. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning.’

  I got in the patrol car and bumped down the dirt road. I thought again about what Holland had said to me two weeks ago about some men being better able to stand things when the shooting starts. I knew he was talking about more than just not getting killed or maimed so bad you wished you’d been killed. Holland was talking about how some men weren’t much bothered by the killing. I had been, and I carried with me the glazed eyes of every Japanese soldier I’d taken the life from on Guadalcanal. But I’d fought with men like Holland who seemed bred for fighting the same way gamecocks are. Their eyes lit up when the shooting started. They were utterly fearless, and you thanked God they were on your side instead of the other. Like Holland, they’d wanted souvenirs from their kills, mainly gold teeth carved out with Ka-Bar knives, leaving the mouths of dead Japanese gapped-toothed like jack-o’-lanterns.

  As I slowed at the mailbox with ALEXANDER painted on it, I wondered if Billy Holcombe could kill a man. If Holland Winchester didn’t show up by morning I was going to have to give that question some serious thought.

  Travis’s truck was parked beside Daddy’s, and Travis himself was on the roof. He’d heard me drive up but kept hammering until he’d used the half dozen nails clenched in his mouth. Then he stepped down the ladder to where I waited. We’d been born less than two years apart, and though we were both gray-eyed and tall, I’d always been big-boned like Daddy, while Travis favored Momma. But Travis had filled out in the last few years. There was no mistaking we were brothers, at least on the outside.

  ‘What brings you up here,’ he said, and not in a welcome way. ‘I know it ain’t your family.’

  His saying that rankled me, mainly because of the truth in it .

  ‘I’ve been looking for Holland Winchester.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’ Travis asked.

  ‘Disappeared.'

  ‘And you’re wanting to find him?’

  ‘Not particularly, but that’s my job.’

  ‘Well he ain’t here, Sheriff.’

  I let the ‘Sheriff’ comment pass. I didn’t want this visit to end like the last one.

  ‘I was going to take Daddy over to Salem for supper.’

  ‘He’s done ate,’ Travis said. ‘There was a time you’d have known that.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Mending fence in the far pasture.’

  Travis waved the hammer toward the roof.

  ‘That’s why I’m doing this now. Everybody but Daddy knows he’s too old to be cat-walking a roof. If he was here he’d not let me get up there without him helping me.’

  Travis clamped his mouth shut like it was a spigot he’d let run longer than he meant to. He glanced at the roof. I knew he wanted to get back up there, away from me. A whippoorwill called from the white oak in the back yard, its cry mournful as a funeral dirge.

  ‘How are Will and Carlton?’ I asked.

  ‘Come around once in a while and you’d know.’

  ‘I been meaning to,’ and soon as I spoke I knew my words to be the wrong thing to say.

  ‘Been meaning to,’ Travis said, his words mocking mine.

  He stared at me, the same way he’d stare at a stump in his field or anything else bothersome he’d just as soon not have to deal with.

  ‘How long has it been since you seen them or Daddy? Five months? Six? You think if you buy Daddy a cafe meal that’s some big thing?’

  ‘I don’t need this, Travis,’ I said.

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Travis said, twisting my meaning. ‘You ain’t needed anything up here for a long time.’

  Travis raised his hammer. For a second I thought he might throw it at me.

  I couldn’t have blamed him if he’d tried. Once we’d been close in a way I’d never been with my other brother or sister.

  ‘You boys are ever alike as to share the same shadow,’ Momma had said when we were growing up. She hadn’t been just talking about how we favored one another in our looks. It was something deep inside us— the way we knew what each other was feeling or thinking, the way we didn’t argue and fight like most brothers. We had never said it, but we’d always believed no matter who else came into our lives—wives, children —we would always be that close. Travis believed I’d betrayed that pact, and I knew he was right.

  ‘I got to finish this roof,’ Travis said.

  ‘Tell Daddy I came by,’ I said, getting back in the car.

  I drove out of the valley, the sun sinking into the trees. By the time I got on the blacktop, twilight had turned the strange color it always does in August, a pink tinged with green and silver. That color had always made it seem like time had somehow leaked out of the world, past and present blending together. My mind skimmed across time like a water spider crossing a pool, all the way back to 1935 when I was eighteen and Clemson had just offered me a football scholarship.

  ‘I want to do something to help you celebrate,’ Janice Griffen had told me as we left homeroom. ‘How about dinner, at my house? My father will grill us steaks.’

  I had been too flustered to say anything but yes. Not only flustered but surprised by the invitation. Janice was a town kid, a doctor’s daughter.

  I had parked our family’s twelve-year-old truck a quarter mile from Doctor Griffen’s house. I wore my church clothes, my dress shoes blistering my heels as I walked past big white houses with front yards green as new money.

  Doctor Griffen had met me at the door. He’d placed his arm around my shoulder and led me down a hallway wide as the road that led to my family’s house, a burgundy-colored rug cushioning my steps.

  I followed Doctor Griffen to a den lined with bookshelves. A mahogany writing desk filled one corner, a radio big as a pot-belly stove in the other.

  ‘Have a seat,’ Doctor Griffen said. ‘Janice will be down soon.’

  In a few minutes we gathered around a huge oak dining room table. What struck me at that moment was how everything in that house seemed solid as that table, solid enough to weather a Depression that had caused men once rich to wander the country begging for work and food.

  But I had been wrong. Even at that moment the house, the carpet and furniture, the very chair I sat in, was an illusion. Almost all of Doctor Griffen’s money had been lost years before in the stock crash of 1929, the rest five years later in a land deal.

  ‘Try your steak, Will,’ Doctor Griffen said after the prayer. ‘If it’s too rare I’ll put it back on the grill.’

  He spoke in a light-hearted way, as if an undercooked steak was the biggest concern he had. He was doing all he could, as he would the next three years, to keep an illusion alive for his daughter and wife.

  I picked up my knife, but two forks lay to the left of my plate.

  I hesitated.

  ‘This one,’ Janice had said, handing me the larger fork of the two.

  When I drove into Seneca streetlights were on, the movie house marquee as well. SINGING IN THE RAIN COMING SOON, red letters claimed. There were plenty of farmers praying that marquee was right.
The air seemed heavier, as it always did after I’d been in the mountains. I parked the car in front of the courthouse and walked across the street to McSwain’s Cafe.

  Darrell McSwain sweated like Satan’s own cook as he flipped the liver mush and hamburgers sizzling on his grill. A fan blew right on him, but all it did was keep the smoke out of his face. Couples filled the booths. I nodded at the folks I knew and sat down on a stool. The jukebox played Lefty Frizzell’s ‘Too Few Kisses Too Late.’

  ‘So what will you have, Sheriff?’ Darrell asked. ‘How about some cool weather?’

  ‘Sold all I had to a drummer. Last I seen of him he was highfooting it to the Yukon.’

  ‘Then how about some ice tea and a burger.’

  ‘I can manage that,’ Darrell said, and turned toward his grill. Someone had left a Greenville News on the counter. The Air Force was bombing the hell out of North Korea. Batista had more problems in Cuba. But these events seemed somehow farther away than when I’d read about them this morning. It was as if being in Jocassee had taken me out of the here and now.

  ‘How are they going to do this year?’ Darrell McSwain asked when he lay my supper on the counter.

  I’d played football three years at Clemson, so Darrell and a lot of other people assumed I had some kind of lifelong loyalty. They seemed to forget what had happened after the spring game my junior year. I’d tore up my knee in that game, and Clemson had found a loophole to take my scholarship away.

  ‘We’ll make sure he gets his degree,’ Coach Barkley had promised Daddy when he recruited me, and that had been important to Daddy and especially my Uncle Thomas, who had the most education of anyone in Jocassee.

  ‘There’s nothing more valuable than what is behind this glass,’ Uncle Thomas had once told me, opening a child-tall bookshelf and handing me a book. ‘Knowledge is the one thing no one can take away from you.’

  I’d done my part, good grades in high school and at Clemson, but one hit on the knee and suddenly good grades and a promise made three years earlier no longer mattered.