Burrows Read online

  “Woo hoo! What a fish!”

  Pepper was still mad about losing hers, but she quickly joined me in the rain to admire the bass. I grabbed it by the lower jaw, the way Uncle Cody taught me, and held it up. “I bet this thing weighs ten pounds.”

  “More like five. But that fish is neato.”

  “Don’t matter. Let’s go show it to Miss Becky! And don’t say neato. You ain’t one of them Beatniks.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me. “She’ll wear us out for getting wet.”

  “No, she won’t. She’ll want another one for a fish fry tonight.”

  I took off, leading the way. Already muddy, we wriggled under the gate and jogged up the drive. Once there, I peeked through the screen door. The dinner dishes were already washed and put away, so I knew that gaggle of women had the whole afternoon to gossip and sew on a quilt.

  Miss Sara Hemphill’s scratchy voice came through the open screen. “Well, I swanny.”

  Pepper made a face and moved real jittery like Miss Sara when she talks. “Well I swanny,” she hissed quietly.

  Hearing that old lady’s voice drained all the excitement out of me. Aggravated, I put the rods away back where we got them. After I thought about it for a minute, I decided that dealing with a bunch of old women over the fish would be too much.

  “Wait here.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I’m letting this old bass go.”

  Her eyes widened. “Don’t you want to show it off?”

  “Naw. We’ll just tell Uncle Cody about it later.” Lucky for the fish, the cool, wet weather kept it alive until I got back to the pool. I lowered it into the muddy water and pushed and pulled it for a minute to get water through its gills, like I’d seen Uncle Cody do. The bass soon regained its senses and twisted out of my hand to disappear back into the pool.

  When I returned, we sat on the porch and watched the leaves fall as the rain got heavier. The cackling old ladies set our nerves on edge as their voices came to us through the screens.

  “Elizabeth Dawson is pregnant again.”

  “Don’t she know what causes that?”

  A wave of old lady giggling washed through the screen.

  I blushed when Pepper leaned over and whispered in my ear. “They all know what causes babies.” I didn’t like to think about such things, so instead I watched water drip off the eaves.

  “I heard Phyllis Steele and them got back from Port Arthur a day or so ago. They was down there nearly three weeks and when she come in, she was brown as a Mexican.”

  “I couldn’t stand the humidity that long.”

  “I couldn’t stand Phyllis that long.”

  More gales of laughter. That one made me smile.

  “Did you hear that Martin Davis’ cousin came to visit from California? She don’t have much to do with anybody except Martin, who she dotes on, but he’s in bad shape and they don’t think he’ll see Christmas. Sammy told me she’s a little cleaning cyclone. They say you don’t hardly see her without a rag tied around her head. Cleans all day, every day. She’s living with Donny Wayne Foster and them. Him and his wife moved here from Kiomatia a while back.”

  “Lord child, I wish she’d come over here and help me clean.” That was Miss Becky’s voice.

  “After she does mine.” Miss Sara’s scratchy voice made Pepper stick her finger down her throat, pretending to gag.

  Grandpa turned off the highway and onto the gravel drive, his old truck running smoothly in the moist air. He always said damp air helped a carburetor breathe. He saw us on the porch, stopped at the gate leading up to the hay barn, and honked for us to come unlatch it. We raced through the rain, opened the gate, and rode the running boards up to the barn to help him get a load of hay.

  He didn’t say anything about us being wet, and that was fine by us.

  ***

  It turned chilly late that night, more from the dampness than the weather. I woke after midnight, about to pop. Pepper and I had stayed up to watch Gorgon the Gruesome host a Nightmare episode on Channel 11 out of Dallas. We usually didn’t get that channel, but the weather helped the signal, so we watched Abbott and Costello in a movie about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It wasn’t scary, but it was fun.

  We drank two RC’s apiece and that’s why I had to go to the bathroom so bad. When my feet hit the linoleum, I was glad they didn’t have an outhouse anymore like they did when I was little. I always hated going out to the back after dark. Grandpa wasn’t much for changing things, so it was a long time before he put in a bathroom.

  In fact, Miss Becky still washed clothes in an old wash tub with a ringer that Grandpa set up for her each Tuesday morning. She filled it from a hose and added boiling water from the stove. I only heard her one time say she wished she had a new washer, but she’d never say it around Grandpa.

  I was still half asleep when I went into the bathroom, but I didn’t turn on the light. There was a glow from the kitchen, so after I finished, I walked through the chilly living room and found Grandpa sitting at the table all by himself, wearing only his dukins.

  “What are you doing running around this time of night in your drawers, hoss?”

  “I had to pee. You get hungry?”

  He nudged an empty saucer away with a finger. “Not really. I was thinking and ate a piece of Miss Becky’s cake because it was there.”

  He looked awful sad to me, so I sat down at the table even though I had on nothing but my underwear. “What’s the matter, Grandpa?”

  “Nothing, son. I’s sitting here, looking outside.”

  The upper half of the wooden door was glass, but all I saw was the dark. I didn’t know what to do, so I licked my finger and picked up crumbs from his plate. Forgetting I was there, he stared out into the darkness and talked quietly to himself like he always did.

  His words usually weren’t clear, but I caught a piece of what he was saying. “Never should have quit.”

  “Quit what, Grandpa?”

  He frowned, surprised. “Nothin’. Just thinkin’.”

  I sat with him for a while longer until he stood up as quick as if he’d been stung. “Let’s get to bed. Daylight comes early.”

  Chapter Nine

  Two days later Ned, Cody, and Judge O.C. Rains sat in the rearmost booth of Frenchie’s café, half a block down from the courthouse, laughing about Top’s jail sentence. It was the first Cody had heard of the incident, and though O.C.’s recollection was hilarious, he couldn’t help but feel sorry for his young nephew.

  Ned noticed the brief frown on Cody’s forehead and understood that he was remembering the night at the Rock Hole. Cody had already put two and two together to figure out that Top’s behavior were a direct result of that traumatic night. “O.C., have you found out any more about that crazy killer that came through Tulsa?”

  O.C. cautiously sipped the steaming coffee. “The one they’re after is for sure Kendal Bowden. He was in the nervous house there for a lot of reasons, mostly because he’s plumb crazy.”

  Cody watched Frenchie wiping the counter. The men’s Stetsons lined up, crowns down, in front of one empty stool that kept anyone from sitting right beside their booth. Frenchie moved each hat, wiped the surface, and carefully replaced the hats exactly as she found them.

  “Lots of crazy people are still on the streets.”

  “That’s true, Cody, but this one’s completely out of his mind, even though they said he was all right when they let him out of the sanitarium. I reckon their treatments didn’t take and they turned him loose before he was done. He headed off north for a while and got into some meanness up in Nebraska when he teamed up with a hitchhiker, then he turned around and headed back south, making a bee-line for the river.” O.C. planted his elbow on the table and wagged a forefinger.

  “Them two went plain nuts up there in Nebraska as if Bowden wasn’t crazy enough already. The first murder they hung on him was when they killed a Fuller Brush man for his car, and hadn’t drove it but for an hour when
a tire blew out. When another feller stopped to help him change it, they killed him, too, and stole his car. The next thing they know, Kendal and that other feller…”

  “Don’t he have a name?” Ned asked.

  O.C. shrugged. “Gantry, I believe. They hid out on a farm in Kansas for a day or two, before they killed the folks who lived there. The sheriff still hasn’t found out if they knew them people or not. Before breaking Jennings out, they stopped at a Tulsa store for ice and robbed the man that owned it. They don’t know if he tried to fight, argue, or pick his nose, but they shot and killed him, too.”

  “Did they cut their heads off, like they did Jennings and Josh Brooks?” Cody asked.

  “Naw, just left ’em laying there.”

  “Then how are they sure these are the same ones?”

  “They are. And to top it all off, he’s from here in Chisum. Kendal Bowden is George Hart’s stepson.”

  “That the same George Hart that used to own Hart and Hart Funeral Home with his brother Alvin?” A sizzle of fear ran up Cody’s spine. He hated undertakers, those solemn men who stood around in dark suits and handled dead people who weren’t kinfolk. “Wasn’t he kin to Sheriff Poole?”

  “The same. They was first cousins. And you know all those boys are crazy as Bessie bugs. Somehow they’re kin to the Fosters, who’s kin to the Martins and Davises.”

  “They’re all somehow kin us, too, I imagine, if we dig deep enough.” Ned stirred his coffee slowly, remembering Cody’s fistfight involving Donny Wayne a few months earlier. Small-town connections were sometimes as tangled as overgrown briars on a fencerow.

  “Anyway, they broke that Jennings boy out, after cutting a guard’s throat. The Oklahoma highway patrol found Gantry in a ditch up near Cloudy. The other two got away, that is, they thought so until y’all found Jennings in the river.” O.C. held his cup aloft. Frenchie came around the counter with a fresh pot.

  “I remember hearing Kendal was a strange little kid,” Ned recalled. “Stayed out of sight most of the time after his mama died and I heard something was wrong with him when he was a kid. Miss Sweet knew, because she was the midwife when he come squalling into this world, but she never said a word about what was wrong. Right there toward the end, something went on inside the funeral home that no one would talk about, but whatever it was, they sent him off and didn’t want him back.”

  John Washington’s auntie, Miss Sweet, served as a midwife and acted as a healer in the county. Mostly called to duty by the colored population, poor whites often trusted her skills instead of trained doctors. Sometimes even those with money turned to her for discretion, or embarrassing ills or pregnancies. The old woman didn’t care about color or family problems. She trusted in her Lord and served those who came for help.

  Because the fresh coffee was too hot to drink, O.C. poured a splash from the cup and into the saucer. He delicately picked it up with his fingertips, blew across the surface and sipped the cooler liquid. Cody grinned at the old man and the saucer. He’d seen Ned do it a hundred times in Miss Becky’s kitchen, but he’d never watched anyone cool coffee like that in a café.

  “It was a nasty affair.” O.C. sniffed the coffee and Cody grinned again. “Come to find out, Alvin Hart had been messin’ with that kid for years.” When he saw the questioning frown on Cody’s forehead, he checked to be sure Frenchie wasn’t within earshot and lowered his voice. “You know, he was diddlin’ Kendal. I heard George had a part in it, too, but they never pinned anything on him.”

  Immediately uncomfortable, Cody unconsciously leaned back, as if to distance himself from the disgusting topic.

  “Something snapped inside Kendal, and before long they had to send him to the Crazy House, but it was all hush hush. I tried to find out what else was going on, but those state boys kept close-mouthed about the whole thing. It wasn’t my case and I didn’t have no business nosing around, but I knew something was up when that son-of-a-bitchin’ Val Jackson got involved and changed the venue to Potter County.

  “They sent Alvin to the pen for a couple of years over Kendal. Then, while all the state investigators were digging around, they found out that instead of burying or cremating the bodies of folks who didn’t have any money, or who died alone, the Harts hauled them out to a sand pit on an old farm not far from Blossom and dumped the bodies there.” O.C. picked up the cup again, taking a quick sip to see if the liquid had cooled. It hadn’t. He set the cup down sharply and licked his burned lips.

  Shocked, Cody looked to Ned for confirmation. “It sure ’nough happened. I saw it. It was pitiful the way they done those poor people. Pitched them in that hole and covered the bodies with a little lime. They deserved time in the pen for that one, too, but they never convicted George. I still can’t figure out why not.”

  “Because they had the trial outside of Lamar County, that’s why.” O.C.’s face reddened at the memory. “That was Val Jackson’s doings, too.”

  Cody gave Ned a questioning look. “Val was a judge here with O.C. for a while, until he got voted out. They didn’t gee haw too well together.”

  “Because he was a no’count son-of-a-bitch,” O.C. repeated. “The Harts still had money, then, until they spent it all on the trial. Why, George Hart was a world-wide hunter back when he was younger. He went to Alaska, Canada, and all over Africa, bringing home heads and hanging them on walls. He had one whole room full of animal heads that he bragged about, saying everyone should hang trophies to show what kind of men they are. Never saw the likes of it, and him leaving his son home with Alvin and his doings. The trials and fines cost them everything they had and they lost the funeral home, but through their daddy, they owned the Cotton Exchange down on the tracks, and that’s where they’ve lived from then on.

  “You’ll see George out every now and then, but I heard Alvin is so bad off now from old timer’s disease that he stays inside. George walks around late at night, picking up odds and ends that people throw out. Kids have taken to calling him the Ghost Man, but those brothers haven’t socialized with anyone in so long that people have mostly forgot ’em.”

  “I heard about the Ghost Man when I was in high school,” Cody recalled. “But kids are always talking about ghosts at the hanging tree in Center Springs, or the well that’s haunted by the ghost of a slave.” He shivered.

  Ned and O.C. chuckled. “Possum run over your grave?” They’d told similar stories when they were kids.

  “Nobody sees the Ghost Man in the light,” Cody said in a spooky voice. He switched back to his normal tone as the memories returned. “He only shows up at night, slipping around town, still wearing a ratty old black undertaker’s suit and carrying a sack, or pulling an old homemade wagon full of junk down the street. Us kids tried to scare each other by thinking he was still fooling with dead bodies after the funeral home closed down, or stealing them from the graveyard, and maybe he is.”

  O.C. was finally able to sip his coffee. “You ain’t the only one he makes nervous. From time to time people call and want something done about him, but when I ask what laws he’s broke, they don’t know. They just want him arrested and off the streets, but if we start hauling everybody in that we don’t like, we’ll have to build another jail.

  “Most of the complaints fell off when Hart took to spending his time on the colored side of the tracks. Our folks don’t care what goes on over there, as long as it don’t come across to the north side. John’s people ain’t much for complaining about the Ghost Man. They let him alone, and George tends to his business…whatever that is.”

  O.C. sipped his coffee, letting his eyes wander around the café. Frenchie raised her eyebrows when she caught his gaze. He shook his head. He didn’t need any more coffee right then. He’d gotten the temperature just right.

  “Well, anyway, back to what we were talking about. Kendal is still out there and I’ve got a pretty good idea him and that partner of his killed Josh and them, and that Jennings boy. Now we can’t find hide nor hair of Kendal, and all thos
e investigators think he’s still around here. He has enough kinfolk in this county that he can stay hid the rest of his life.

  “The investigators have set up shop down in the basement at the courthouse, but they’re thinking he’s gone back north. They’ll be out moving tomorrow and searching up in the Kiamichi, because they got a tip he was hiding back up around Cloudy.”

  “I’m not sure of that.” Cody worried his coffee cup. “I’ll nose around and see what I turn up, but I doubt we’ll see him though, unless he gets drunk and runs into somebody.”

  “That’s what might happen,” Ned told him. “It’s the screwy things that get people caught. I’ve seen it.”

  “You saw a lot when you were constable.” Cody tried to change the subject. “Which of those old stories have stuck with you the most?”

  Ned’s eyes twinkled. “The ones I ain’t telling you.”

  They laughed again.

  Ned motioned for O.C. to lean in. They spoke quietly for a moment, knowing that everyone in the café listened to their conversations. “I’m hearing that folks are starting to worry that The Skinner might have come back to town and killed that feller and dumped his body in the river.”

  O.C.’s eyebrows rose.

  “What have you said?”

  “Told the ones that asted me that it wasn’t nothin’ like what The Skinner had done, and that I thought he’d gone to Mexico.”

  “They say anything else?”

  Ned glanced around at the customers. “Naw, they usually shrug and say he’ll eventually come back.”

  They leaned back to study on the conversation. O.C. examined his coffee cup for a long moment. “Well, you think The Skinner might have killed that feller in the river, and Onie Mae’s family!?”

  Startled for a moment at the O.C.’s volume, Ned quickly realized what he’d done. He answered in a loud and clear voice. “Naw, O.C. He’s most likely in Mexico right now, or dead down on the border somewhere. He went down there to get away from us and the Mexicans probably got him trying to cross the river.”