Write Sorrow on the Bosom of the Earth

By Howard Marsee

It is 1972, and Clay Dautry, a successful criminal attorney, has left Los Angeles under a cloud. He is returning to Southeastern Kentucky, to the coal country where he grew up, to unravel a family mystery. For months he's published a classified ad in a local newspaper. In it he seeks to learn why his father killed a man in 1929. Even before he arrives, people have begun to die. As he exits the train, Clay sees a mentally retarded black man in shackles. The man is Ortie, and he's shot a local businessman in a practical joke gone terribly awry. Ellen Reames, a young Kentucky attorney, stands beside Ortie as an angry crowd throws eggs. Clay and Ellen set out to solve two mysteries: how Ortie came to shoot a local restaurant owner, and why Clay's father killed a competing mine operator. Someone will murder to protect secrets hidden for forty years, and Clay and Ellen become targets of a deadly conspiracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard Marsee
• Release date: Mar 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310710391

Howard Marsee

Howard Marsee is a trial lawyer practicing in Orlando, Florida. He now serves as a mediator, arbitrator and special magistrate. He received his B.A. degree from the University of South Florida, where he participated in readers' theater and wrote news stories for WUSF radio. Before attending law school, he taught English and journalism, and during part of that time attended the University of Minnesota on a Wall Street Journal Fellowship. He obtained his law degree from the University of Florida and there served as Associate Editor of the Law Review. He is the author of various scholarly articles, short stories and poetry.

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Prologue

It is a cool April night, and the mountainside is awash in moonlight. At the base of the mountain, a small, wooden house nestles beside a railroad track. Wisps of smoke rise from the chimney, and the scent of honeysuckle is heavy on the air. Lantern light spills through one window and out onto the porch. A swing hangs motionless from chains, and a bucket of coal sits by the door.

Three men, wearing bandanas over their faces, walk slowly toward the house, carrying cans of gasoline. One wears a newsboy cap and whispers instructions to the other two. They step onto the porch. No dogs bark. There are no voices. One man empties a can of gasoline near the front door, pouring it against the wall. The other two empty their cans beneath the windows. The acrid smell of gasoline replaces the aroma of honeysuckle.

The man with the cap puts a match to the wall. There is a flash, and the fire quickly grows larger and larger. A young woman appears at the door, then runs back into the house and returns with a bucket of water. The men stand in the shadows, off to the side of the porch. She throws water on the fire, and splashes wet her nightgown. Through the gown, in the glow of the fire, her breasts are firm, the nipples showing through.

The man with the cap steps from the shadows and wraps his arm tightly around the woman’s throat. She struggles to go back into the house, but the other men help hold her. They drag her from the porch as flames rush up the walls. The man with the cap tears off her gown and throws her to her knees. She is naked and trying desperately to crawl to the house, but the man holds her by her feet and drags her through the dirt of the yard.

Inside the house, it is hot. Smoke fills the top halves of the rooms, and only the lower halves are visible. It is hard to breathe. Flames have entered the front door and are eating the curtains and walls. In the bedroom a small girl cowers in one corner. She looks frantically about for someone, her eyes filled with tears. Flames reach the corner, and her pajamas are on fire. There is the smell of hair burning. She reaches out for someone, anyone, and a small scream shatters the solitude of the night.

Chapter

1

I felt the forward motion of the train. It snaked in morning darkness along mountain rails, and the passenger coach leaned gently outward on each curve. The metallic clatter of its wheels, in the hours since Knoxville, had seeped into and become part of me. I knew we were moving through cut banks littered with coal and across mountain streams yellowed by clay. I shifted position on the leather seat and leaned my head against the window. The smell of pines hung heavy in cold air, and lights from inside the coach cast flickering patterns across the passing, low-hanging branches of trees. The train was moving higher into the mountains and deeper into my past.

It was late October of 1972, and I had just turned forty. Hollisville was to me then little more than a small bundle of photographs yellowed and ravaged by time. In the soft coach light I thumbed through the photographs one by one. In them I am always the boy with the tousled, blonde hair and sad mouth. The truth is that a smile would have been out of keeping with that time and place. All the adults and children in the photographs wear rough clothing and are stern, worn and poor. Behind them are unpainted houses, broken chairs, cardboard boxes replacing broken windows, and battered cars. Defeated people stare back at me. I see the wrinkled foreheads of women and the creases in men’s faces filled with the color of the mines. These were the faces of coal country in the southeastern Kentucky of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

I went through the photographs again. None evoked a joyful memory. There must have been a time when I was truly happy there. Maybe it was contained in the periphery of the photographs, where the edges were faded and torn. I’d hoped that the photographs might disclose what memory had concealed, but only what was central remained.

I put the photographs back in my bag and stared out the train’s window. In the east I saw the first hint of dawn--that initial, faint light that renders mountains dark silhouettes against the sky. I wondered again why I was returning to these mountains. Maybe I wasn’t returning to Hollisville so much as I was fleeing Los Angeles. Sometimes you can’t be sure whether you’re running to or from something. Sometimes you’re just running.

The lights in the coach were low, and the music system played softly in the almost empty car. Pure, plaintive country guitar.

Are you lonesome tonight?

Do you miss me tonight?

Are you sorry we drifted apart?

Does your memory stray to a bright summer day

When I kissed you and called you sweetheart?

Three blasts of the train’s horn signaled we were entering a tunnel. I moved quickly to close two windows I’d opened, but I stumbled over the outstretched legs of the old man sleeping across the aisle. Quickly, everything outside became black, inside-the-mountain black. Diesel smoke pushed inward, fouling the air. Coach lights hung shrouded in gray haze. Spasms of coughing erupted from the other side of the coach and continued in violent bursts through what seemed interminable smoke and dark.

The train moved clear of the tunnel. The sleeping man had jerked upright and was doubled over in desperate coughing. It was the first sound from him since Knoxville. It was there he’d limped aboard the train and, without so much as a hello, gone to sleep. For the last two hours he and I were the only people in the coach.

Sum bitch, you ain’t ever learnt to close a window? The man leaned forward, his chest heaving, struggling to clear his lungs. I could see gaps where front teeth had been. Beard stubble showed in wiry patches across sunken cheeks. Blackened fingers rubbed red and watery eyes. He looked to be in his late sixties, but in the mountains you never could be sure. The Cumberland Plateau had a way of accelerating life.

I’m sorry, but I guess I was too slow. Are you alright? Can I help?

Yeah. Hand me ----- that bag, he pointed upward, still preoccupied with his efforts to breathe.

I pulled a battered suitcase from the overhead bin. Its cardboard corners were bumped and frayed. The latch was broken, and the lid was tied closed with twine. I untied it and placed it on the seat beside him.

In the bottom corner, you see a ----- a bottle of little white pills? Let me have ‘em. He breathed shallow and fast.

I fumbled through worn clothing and found a bottle labeled Theophylline.

This it?

Yeah. That’s it. He opened the bottle and, with three gulps from a flask, washed down two pills. There came the sweet smell of whisky. I went to the lavatory at the end of the coach and brought back a cup of water. I opened more windows, and cold air began washing away the stench of diesel. The old man shivered and pulled the collar of his shirt close over his neck. He drank slowly and continued to cough, less violently now, occasionally burying his face to spit into a crumpled handkerchief.

He was thin and pale, like a man long hidden from the sun. His coarse, flannel shirt was typical of the mountains. In his shirt pocket he carried a bag of chewing tobacco. The shirt was tucked into carpenter overalls, the kind with a hammer loop on the side of the leg, and both the shirt and overalls were threadbare at the cuffs. His brown felt hat, stained with sweat, lay crumpled on the seat. His gray hair was thin, and his hands and fingernails bore the unmistakable black of a coal miner.

We sat for a long time, neither of us saying anything. He leaned his face near the open window and closed his eyes. He drew in long, deep breaths. I knew that the Theophylline would take time to dilate his lungs.

I thought of my own father, of his waking in the night and placing his head over steam from a pot of boiling water. I could still smell the menthol rub my mother placed in the pot. I could still see the panic in my mother’s and father’s eyes. I remembered in the hospital seeing him once in an oxygen tent, and the doctors shaking their heads. He lived, but he was even sicker and more desperate after that. Winters were always the worst. The metal chimney that served our coal-burning stove leaked smoke, and it crowded into the cramped spaces of our three room house.

Our poverty and my father’s sickness must have taken a toll on my mother. Of all the people in the photographs, she is the saddest. At some time, before my ability to recall, she must have retreated into herself. She was as secretive and self-contained as a mountain cave. She would sit on our porch at night and stare into the dark. I always wondered what she saw there. It was clear enough that she loved me, but there was always a great distance between us--a chasm that we were never able to bridge.

The old man was coughing only sporadically now, but it was still a barking, sharp cough. He pulled on his coat. It’s still a fer piece to Hazard. Where you going?

Hollisville.

It was fourteen years since I’d last visited Hollisville, and I wondered what I would find. My father died right after I returned from Korea. My mother died while I was at the University of Kentucky. I could never have attended U.K. without money from the Veterans’ Adjustment Act. It was one of the few good things that came out of my time in Korea.

In 1958, after the University of Kentucky, I moved to California. I’m not sure whether I was chasing the end of a rainbow or fleeing the confines of the mountains. It was in Los Angeles that I graduated from law school in 1961. The Veterans’ Adjustment Act didn’t cover law school, and I paid my way by taking a job in Santa Barbara with a two-man office of private investigators. My job was to interview people. The hours were flexible, and it was good training for criminal law.

During law school and during my eleven years practicing law in Los Angeles, I had not returned to Hollisville--not even for a visit. Year by year, the number of relatives and friends in Hollisville dwindled. I had fewer and fewer reasons to return. Many of the boys I knew in high school never made it back from Korea. I was luckier.

The train’s music system crackled and hissed through one country song after another. Gradually, the old man’s cough gave way to heavy sighs and then eased. His hands trembled in his lap. He put the soiled handkerchief back into his overalls pocket. A faint color returned gradually to his face.

Pills make me jittery as hell, but doctor in Knoxville said I got a choice--jitters or not breathin’. Doc calls it COPD.

I knew more than a little about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It was the price men paid for smoking and too many years in the mines. Smoke and coal dust damages the lungs and sucks life a breath at a time. I remembered my father’s last breath, how he struggled to take air into his lungs and, as he exhaled that last time, how he just faded away.

You feeling better?

I guess. Coal dust ain’t kilt me yet. Diesel won’t.

You need more water or anything?

No. Just need to sit awhile.

I’m really sorry about the windows. I shouldn’t have opened them, but it’s been a long time since I breathed mountain air.

You not from round here? It was as much an accusation as a question.

I hesitated. Well, I was born at Hollisville, but I’ve been gone a long time.

Why you comin’ back? The question came abruptly. It was the kind of question I might have asked as a lawyer, and it was a fair question. But I was in no mood to tell this stranger about Julio Alfaro, the client who had been raped and knifed in a Los Angeles jail, nor about my wife, who had simply moved on. Instead, I gave the answer I’d been giving myself. I’m going to look into some family history. I’m not planning to stay long.

You got family in Hollisville? The old man turned sideways, put one leg on the seat, and leaned forward to look at me intently across the aisle.

Aunts and cousins mostly.

What’s yer name?

Dautry, Clay Dautry. What’s yours?

Shelvie Rowlett. Years ago, I knowed a Dwight Dautry. Used to come up to Hazard to work in the Martha Mine. Coal prices was high then. You blood related?

He was my uncle.

You must be the Dautry been runnin’ the ads in the Hollisville Gazette."

For five months I had run the same classified advertisement:

INFORMATION WANTED about the killing of Arlo Sowders by Saul Dautry and Morris Dautry near Hollisville in 1929. Call attorney Clay Dautry collect. 562-678-0004. Los Angeles, California. Reward paid.

I’d gotten no meaningful responses to the ad, a few dead ends. Two people claimed to have read newspaper reports, but I’d already read in archives the scant coverage that was published at the time. It was amazing how little ink was devoted to murders in those days, three or four column inches at most. Maybe it was because there were so many shootings, or maybe everyone in town already knew the details. I had tried to get court records through the Rock County Historical Society, but the Society’s historian had told me that none existed.

You’ve seen the ad? I asked.

"Hell, Gazette’s the only paper in four counties. Ever body that can read reads it. You got yer answer yet?"

No.

Lots of talk in Hazard. People wonder why you want to know.

Just family history. Saul Dautry was my father. Morris Dautry was my uncle. They served five years for the killing. My relatives always said that Sowders shot first, but I’ve never found out if that’s true. Always wondered what caused the shooting.

In them days men didn’t need much reason. Ever body packed a gun. They was mean times.

Have you heard anything about the killing?

No. Lot of fights and killings then. Anythin’ special bout this one?

"My father and uncle served five years in a Frankfort prison before they were pardoned. I read that in an old issue of the Gazette. It seemed a short sentence for murder."

The old man chuckled and coughed lightly. That seem strange to you, huh? Got to understand the times. Folks figured that even in a fair fight, you had to spend time if you kilt somebody. Prevented blood feuds. But a few greased palms, or friends with lots of votes, and pardons was easy enough had after tempers got cooled.

How well did you know Uncle Dwight? I shifted without realizing it into lawyer mode.

Not good, just that he was a good worker. Was a dynamiter. Not a job most men wanted. Finally got him kilt in the Martha Mine. Spark from his powder ram set off the charge afore he was ready. Blew the ram clean through his chest. I do remember he had the blackest eyes I ever see’d. Folks said it was a family thing with the Dautry’s. That’s why I’d never a figured you for a Dautry. You got blue eyes.

The man sat silent, his mind turning. He leaned back in the corner of his seat. Seems you big on history. So if you find out bout this killing, what difference it going to make?

None probably. It’s just something I’ve always wanted to know.

Man ought to be real sure he needs to know. As I see it, history’s fer folks that don’t live in the mountains. Mountains are chock full of mysteries. Mountain folk careful not to go frettin’ after them. Man’s gotta make sure he can live with what he finds.

Chapter

2

When the train pulled into Hollisville, the old man was asleep, and I slipped quietly from my seat. I didn’t want to disturb him. He was going on to Hazard, even deeper into coal country than Hollisville. I thought again of my father and the respites that sleep provided from the struggle to breathe.

On the station platform an unruly crowd milled around a small white woman and a black man in chains. One chain encircled his waist, and his wrists were shackled tightly to it. Near him, two white men with badges and shotguns stood guard. One of the men held a length of chain that ran down to shackles around the black man’s ankles. The woman looked to be in her mid thirties, and she wore a gray suit that set off a French braid of auburn hair.

The black man was huge, well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. A plaid shirt stretched tight across his shoulders and biceps. Overalls too short for him exposed bare ankles above his shoe tops. A hat with a torn brim sat to the back of his head. He was sobbing, and his massive body shook.

Someone from the crowd threw an egg, and it hit the black man on his shoulder. A second egg missed. A third egg hit the side of the woman’s face. She wiped it off with her hand as best she could, but she didn’t turn around. When an egg landed close to him, one of the men with badges turned to the crowd and scowled. He said something I couldn’t hear. The egg throwing temporarily stopped, but the crowd was still loud, and I could hear killer--killer.

I stepped onto the platform one car away from them. The train’s airbrakes still hissed, and gray smoke rose from the exhaust stack of the engine. A piercing October wind blew withered leaves across cold, iron rails. The station was as I remembered it from years ago, its red brick darkened by years of exposure to coal and diesel. It had one exterior, cashier’s window and wooden benches facing the tracks. The overhang of its roof extended to the outer edge of the platform.

The two men with shotguns began pushing the black man up the steps and into the train. He tried to pull free to look back at the woman, and the man with the chain jerked hard. The black man fell face down, his forehead hitting the bottom step of the coach. Blood began to ooze from a cut above one eye. He struggled slowly to his feet and looked imploringly at the woman and the crowd, a look familiar to me from my work in Los Angeles. It was the look of a desolate man, a man being torn from the only world he knows--a man hoping that someone, something will set things right. I never saw a client depart for prison without that look in his eye.

The men with badges forced the black man aboard the train, blood running through one eye and down his cheek. There was the sound of air brakes releasing, and the coach moved slowly forward. Someone in the crowd threw another egg, and it splattered on the platform near the woman’s feet. Without thinking, I moved to her, hoping maybe I could shield her from the crowd. The egg throwing stopped. Without speaking to each other, she and I walked together off the platform and then away toward town. The crowd was already beginning to disperse.

Thanks for the thought, she said, but they would have stopped throwing after the train left anyway. She looked up at me and smiled.

What did he do?

He killed a local businessman.

And he’s been convicted?

Not yet. They’re taking him to the Frankfort prison until trial. The city jail here’s not much. Mostly suitable for drunks and thieves.

How do you know him?

I’m his lawyer. The court appointed me.

Women lawyers were rare in Kentucky then, especially women criminal lawyers.

I’m sorry to ask so many questions. It’s an occupational hazard. I’m a lawyer too. We both laughed. I’m Clay Dautry.

Well, Mr. Dautry, I’m Ellen Reames.

Please, call me Clay. Is there somewhere we can get breakfast?

"There’s Aunt Maggie’s. It’s not the best place in town, but it’s just a few blocks away. Sportsman’s Hideaway is the best place, but its closed for now. In any event, I probably wouldn’t be welcome. The owner is the person that Ortie killed.

Ortie?

My client.

***

Outside Aunt Maggie’s the sidewalk was blocked by a small group of men, businessmen from their appearances, talking over one another in loud, agitated voices.

When’d they find him?

I hear there was blood all over him.

They say he was hit over the head.

Damn town ain’t safe anymore.

Ellen walked to the group and pulled one of the men aside. What happened, Gene?

Karl Bayless found Stanley Nagle dead a half hour ago, in the carport outside the funeral home. Karl was delivering flowers. Says Stanley’s face was in a pool of blood on the concrete. Sheriff Buell’s there now.

Anyone know how it happened?

No idea, but it smells funny if you ask me.

Ellen introduced me briefly to Gene, but I doubt he heard my name. He was already merging back into the crowd that had grown larger and was moving toward the center of town.

Ellen and I went into Aunt Maggie’s and took a booth near the back. It was a small, storefront restaurant, with its name stenciled in orange on its plate-glass window. Seven tables with plastic tablecloths sat scattered about the room. There were five booths in the back, their Naugahyde covers torn in places. A brightly colored jukebox stood in a back corner, but no music was playing. I smelled the unmistakable aroma of bacon frying.

Who’s Stanley Nagle? I asked.

The owner of the only funeral home in Hollisville. He was pretty old. Except for the blood, I’d guess he died of natural causes.

Seems I came to town at an exciting time.

I guess you could say that.

Ellen went to the restroom and, when she returned, she’d removed most of the egg from her face and hair. Small spots remained on her jacket. An aging waitress brought well-worn menus, and I ordered breakfast. Ellen wanted only coffee and toast.

Where do you practice law? she asked.

In Los Angeles. Criminal defense.

"Dautry? Dautry? You the fellow running the ad in the Gazette?"

Yes. Is there anyone who hasn’t read it?

She grinned. News travels fast in the mountains.

I told her of my father and Arlo Sowders. Do you know anything about the shooting?

No. I’ve only been here six years. Wasn’t my first choice of a place to practice.

What law school?

Salmon P. Chase.

University of Kentucky for me, undergraduate. UCLA for law school.

Why Los Angeles? How do you get from U.K. to Los Angeles?

A buddy in Korea told me that California was the land of milk and honey. I was crazy enough to believe him. After I passed the bar exam there, it made sense to stay. You’re not from the mountains?

No. From Cincinnati. She blew across her coffee to cool it.

That’s why you attended Salmon P. Chase?

Yes. It was just across the river. I could commute from Cincinnati. I had to work my way through school as a waitress.

Why did you come to the mountains?

Not lots of jobs for women lawyers in Kentucky, even if you’re at the top of your class. Sam Latiff was the only lawyer to make me an offer out of law school. Guess he figured I would work cheap. Turns out he was right. She laughed.

With two hands she loosed the French braid and let her auburn hair fall on her shoulders, pulling bits of dried egg from a couple of strands. She was attractive--not beautiful, but fine figured and a pretty face; full breasts without being buxom; and chestnut-brown eyes. She was perhaps five feet five and slender. No jewelry that I could see. A casual, to-the-point way of talking that I instantly liked.

I asked, What type of practice do you have?

She seemed slightly amused. This is the mountains. Sam Latiff and I do it all, mostly wills and probate. Some corporations. A lot of family law. Not much criminal law. There’s another lawyer in town that does most of that. Besides, it never pays much. For me it’s usually a court appointment, and the state pays practically nothing. Lucky sometimes to get costs reimbursed. But it helps pay the bills. She smiled.

We exchanged law school stories for awhile. She seemed interested in my office in California, and I described criminal law practice in L.A. She told me about a criminal case she’d won two years before. Then for a few minutes we ate in silence. Outside the front window, cars sat diagonally parked along both sides of a wide street. Hollisville had begun as a boom town when iron ore was discovered in the late 1800’s. The town’s founders made grandiose plans and laid out wide thoroughfares. They built elegant hotels and brick buildings. There was even a health spa at the turn of the century. At one time railroad tracks ran down the middle of Main Street. But the iron ore proved to be of poor quality, and by 1910 the bloom was off the rose. Everyone’s attention turned to coal.

Tell me about the black man, Ortie.

She explained that he’d killed J.D. Stocker, owner of The Sportsman’s Hideaway. Stocker had lived in the mountains all his life and, for most of those years, he owned the Hideaway. Ortie had shot him several weeks ago. It was at the football stadium’s concession stand during a high school game. There was no question. Ortie had pulled the trigger, but serious, unanswered questions remained.

I remembered Stocker from my high school days. The Sportman’s Hideaway