Murderers' Home

By John Windrow

Sam Rave, a young reporter, arrives in Dancyville, Tennessee in 1948 after flunking out of the University of Missouri.
Sam is one of the first people on the scene when Honey Boy Cunningham is found dead. Cunningham, 17, belongs to the town’s most prominent family. He has dressed as a girl and taken poison.
Sam’s curiosity leads him to the story of a bootlegger named Marion Whitlow, who was shot down at the town’s only stoplight the year before.
Whitlow is the child of hardscrabble sharecroppers, orphaned by the age of 16.
Civvy Swain takes him into her home when he is a teenager.
All of his life he is a tramp and an outlaw.
In 1933 when he is 26, Whitlow is working for a moonshine ring that runs whiskey from Tennessee to Chicago. The ring operates a huge still on a barge that steams up and down the Loosahatchie River.
One spring day, he sets out on what will be his last run. Whitlow intends to steal the truck and run away with Delanie Gasconade, a siren who has seduced him. Delaine is the girlfriend of a vicious gangster.
Dancy County Sheriff Hot McCool and his deputy Rip Harvey ambush Whitlow. Whitlow kills McCool. Harvey panics and flees, but Whitlow is arrested.
Whitlow escapes the electric chair and is sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Whitlow is paroled in 1941 on the condition that he join the Army. He serves with Patton’s Third Army in Europe.
After the war, Whitlow begins small time bootlegging again. He is shot and killed getting off a bus in with a suitcase filled with whiskey and gin. Harvey and Honey Boy are at the scene. Harvey says he killed Whitlow.
Honey Boy poisons himself, and Sam enters the story.
Civvy is the major narrative voice. The story is told as she remembers it in 1977.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483555089

Book preview

EPILOGUE

1

JUNE 1948, HONEY BOY

The air was close and stale, filled with specks of dust that gleamed like fire when a ray of sunlight catches them, hanging in the air like tiny feathers, like children in white gowns had a pillow fight and slipped off, giggling.

Sam Rave climbed the creaking stairway. A door banged open and Rip Harvey came out, yanking his hat low over his face. He had a big pistol with a black walnut grip jammed into his belt.

Sam heard a tinny radio playing a guitar rag.

Rip moved like a man who would kick a dog if there was a dog somewhere to kick. He threw a shoulder into Sam as they passed on the narrow stairs.

Watch yourself, he said. Rip didn’t talk so much as he snarled or growled at folks.

Sam was young and green then, and it startled him. He watched the sheriff go on down to the street, his boots making a mad, clumping sound.

Arteau Guntop, the undertaker, waited in the dingy room. Arteau was a little, gray-haired man with a face as smooth as a doll’s.

A happy voice from the radio on the dresser sang:

Gimme back that ring I bought you

Gimme back that new glass eye

Gimme back them teeth I lent you

Baby, don’t you say goodbye

When I take my peg leg back

You gonna lay right down and cry

Arteau clicked it off.

Thanks for calling me, Sam said.

The room was a mess. Everything lurched or sagged the wrong way. A phonograph machine tilted on the nightstand by the bed and little, black 45 rpm records were flung across the rug, which was full of fleas that hopped when someone took a step. Honey Boy’s yellow cat streaked between Sam’s legs and yowled on out the door.

Never knew a girl who didn’t fancy cats, Guntop said. Jesus Howard Christ, what a smell.

Magazines were piled up in the corners. Hair and makeup tips, fashion do’s and don’t’s, as the fast girls say nowadays, how to find a man, how to get a man, how to keep a man, how to make a man do right. On a smeared mirror above a bureau dresser there were glossy photos of bosomy movie stars with big, blonde hair, dangly earrings and blood-red, pouty lips.

Honey Boy lay across the bed in a white silk taffeta dress with red lace trim and sheer black stockings. A red evening wrap with a hood lay on the carpet by a pair of red high heels. The fleas popped on and off the shoes. His toenails were red as an open mouth.

A blonde wig on the bed beside him poufed up like a little haystack. The dress was hiked up, showing Honey Boy’s legs.

Sam found himself staring at white lace garters. Honey Boy’s face was blanched and colorless, his tongue black and swollen, his eyes pale and blank as marble. Mascara had run swimming down his cheeks and his lipstick was smeared.

Honey Boy had cried his eyes out.

Arteau, a right pert, dapper little man, took a handkerchief from his coat pocket, picked up a dainty bottle from the nightstand and sniffed it.

Food for Acheron, he said with a pearly smile.

Sam gave him a blank look.

Arsenic, Guntop said. That’s what Rip said when he called me.

Didn’t stick around long, did he? Sam said.

Didn’t stick around atall. He called and said it was a suicide and for me to come get the body.

Did he say anything about the way the deceased was dressed? Sam asked, raising his eyebrows.

No he didn’t, Arteau said. You’d think it was worth remarking on, wouldn’t you? That’s Rip. Wouldn’t tell you if he was bleeding.

He ain’t said but two words to me since I tried to raise a conversation with him about Marion Whitlow, Sam said. And he said them this morning.

Arteau smiled. Let me guess, Happy Birthday?

Watch yourself, Sam said, grinning.

Marion Whitlow, that unfortunate, badass individual you’re so intrigued with, is a tender subject with Rip, Arteau said.

Everybody needs a hobby, Sam said with a shrug.

Sam took a job at the Dancyville Daily Morning Democrat that spring. He’d been going through the files in the newspaper office after Aaron Reuben Douglass hired him and came across the short account of how Sheriff Rip Harvey had shot and killed the bootlegger Marion Whitlow at the stoplight on Washington Street on Dec. 22, 1947.

The reason this story is so important to me, Civvy Swain, is I loved Marion Whitlow like he was my own blood. Lord knows, I did. He was a hard boy to know, but for me, he was a easy boy to love.

The way the newspaper told it, which was as cold as ice, like Marion’s life didn’t mean nothing, was: The bootlegger, according to reports, disembarked from the Greyhound bus from Nashville at 10 p.m Monday with a suitcase.

Whitlow was on parole after having served eight years in the Cumberland State Penitentiary for killing Dancy County Sheriff William Hot McCool in 1933. (Hot was my husband Lawson’s second cousin on his mama’s side.) Whitlow was confronted by Sheriff Rip Harvey, who ordered him to open the suitcase.

Whitlow, who was well known for his violent ways (which is a dirty lie if I ever read one), reached into his overcoat as if he were going for a pistol, according to reports.

Sheriff Harvey, noted for his skill with a pistol, fired once. Whitlow was dead at the scene, according to Dancy County Coroner Arteau Guntop.

Sheriff Harvey said later that when he searched Whitlow’s body, there was no pistol on him, and his right hand held the key to the suitcase.

When opened during the investigation, the suitcase was revealed to be filled with half-pints of cheap gin and whiskey. The sheriff said that he had suspected Whitlow of illegally selling liquor from his rented room over Arlene Screws’ Penny Grocery on Washington and that was why he had confronted him.

A known killer shouldn’t have made such a sudden move, Harvey said.

The District Attorney’s Office said it will investigate, but the shooting appeared justifiable.

Well that’s how the newspaper told it, and it has the ring of truth, the sound of truth, but it ain’t true. Not by a far sight. But that’s what newspapers do. Sam told me once that newspapers only tell the varnished truth. They ain’t much for the unvarnished truth.

Sam, who had plentiful time on his hands, wanted to know more — a smart young man’s natural curiosity. But the more folks around Dancyville he asked about it, the more accounts he heard. He never heard it the same way twice.

Those who appeared to be in a position to know the most said the least.

Sam asked about it once when he found himself sitting next to Rip Harvey at the counter of the Little Pig Café. Rip said, It was all in the paper.

Arteau pointed at Honey Boy in his white, silk dress, sprawled on the bed. I gotta take care of the business at hand, he said.

The undertaker approached the corpse. Flies dashed themselves against the window by the bed. Arteau daintily lifted Honey Boy’s dress as if he was carrying out some sort of professional obligation.

Pink lace panties, he said. I guess if you’re gonna go the fey route, you might as well go whole hog, like anything else.

Sam nodded, taking notes.

Arteau took off his hat with his left hand, brushed it against his trouser leg, raised his right hand and said, By the authority vested in me by whoever runs the sad, old world, Dancy County in particular, I hereby rule this death a suicide.

Anything else?

I think this boy had some problems in his life.

Like what? Sam said, putting the notebook in his back pocket. Just for curiosity’s sake.

I would guess that he was unlucky in love. Arteau grinned and shrugged, fishing around in his breast pocket. He pulled out a pack of filtertip Picayunes and a small box of silver matches and lit one on the sole of his glossy, black shoe.

The cigarette perched in his mouth at a jaunty angle like Roosevelt used to do and the smoke formed a lazy white wreath in the stinking room.

Smoke covers up the smell a little, he said. Gets the taste out of your mouth. Want one?

Sam, who never smoked unless he was drinking, said he would prefer to crack a window.

Might help, Arteau said, if you can do it without disturbing the deceased.

Sam leaned gingerly across the corpse, smacked the window several times with the heel of his hand and raised it. The stink faded, then came back stronger, revived by the fresh air.

I would guess that this boy got his heart broke, Arteau said. Or maybe thought people had found out about him and he couldn’t bear it. So he took some solace where he could find it.

He looked at Honey Boy and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. Well, as the old lady said when she kissed the cow, everybody to his own taste.

The open window didn’t help the flies any. The ones that had been buzzing against the dirty window glass remained and others joined them. Several landed on Honey Boy’s face. Arteau leaned over and fanned at them with his hat.

Who is he? Sam asked. Dancyville is a small place but Sam was new in town and still feeling his way along. And I will take a cigarette after all, please.

Arteau held out the pack, Sam took one, then waited as Arteau struck another match.

His name is Cunningham, Arteau said. First name was Riley, but everybody called him Honey Boy. He’s 16.

Damn, Sam said, 16.

The tobacco began to cut the putrid death taste in his mouth.

The family is very prominent, Arteau said.

And he’s only 16.

Arteau nodded.

Lack of empathy, he said. There’s all kinds of folks in the world with all kinds of problems, but there ain’t enough empathy to go around.

He leaned over and fanned at the feasting flies again, they arose in a somber buzz and resettled.

You ever wonder why so many people like to go to funerals even though they’re scared of death? Arteau asked.

Sam blew smoke and shook his head.

That’s because you’re so damn young, Guntop said. Give it a few years. You’ll wonder about all kinds of things.

He fingered the dainty lace dress again. The reason is lack of empathy. Folks ignore the deceased, socialize with the living and they get fed afterward. They can’t imagine being dead themselves. If they had that much empathy, they’d never go into a room with a coffin.

The little undertaker stopped fanning at the flies, and gently spread a handkerchief over Honey Boy’s face.

When you get right down to it, he said, as he fussed with the handkerchief, life ain’t nothing but a bunch of goodbyes, one after another. Most folks can’t stand to even think about that.

They heard the hearse pull up outside, the motor idling, the doors open and close.

What the hell am I supposed to bury this catamite in? Arteau said. A rented suit?

Sam laughed and let an ash fall on the rug.

Arteau crushed his cigarette on his shoe with one hand resting on the bed and looked out the window. He straightened up, flicked the butt into the wastebasket by the dresser and looked at himself in the small part of the mirror that wasn’t plastered over with images of glamour girls, adjusted his necktie, brushed off his suit.

There were heavy footsteps on the stairs.

Sam watched Arteau and his helpers take the body down the stairs and load it into the hearse. Then he headed up Broad Street toward the Corner Drug Store.

Droves of country folks were in town for Saturday and Arteau’s two helpers loading the gurney into the hearse drew a crowd. Honey Boy’s yellow cat sat in the gutter, meowing something pitiful.

One assistant was a tall red-haired boy named Lamont Curry, who had handfuls of rusty red freckles and a Adam’s apple that bobbed up and down in his throat like a frog passing through a snake.

The other, Roosevelt Shegogg, was the color of coffee and cream with hazel eyes, curly blue-black hair, blue gums, a Roman nose and teeth going soft from soda pop and Moon Pies.

They eased the corpse into the hearse, working quiet and smooth, wearing the somber faces of their calling. Lamont and Roosevelt had worked for Arteau Guntop since they was teenagers, and they took pride in their work.

They were Arteau’s full time staff at the Ultimate Celestial Funeral Home. He hired extra colored and white help as pallbearers, musicians and mourners, depending on the size of the funeral.

They could all sing like birds and weep at the flutter of a handkerchief. At Arteau’s funerals, the family could have colored attendants in white robes or white ones in black robes. Some wanted both, to say something about a better world to come, I reckon, and that was all right too.

The white boys would sing The Old Rugged Cross, I Love to Tell the Story, Mama Ain’t Dead She’s Only Sleeping, or I’ll Fly Away, Sweet Jesus to piano and guitar in their hillbilly twang.

The colored boys did Swing Low Sweet Chariot, Mary, Martha Don’t You Weep, Every Time I Get the Feeling, and Jesus is on the Main Line to horns, tambourines and organ.

Of course, the white and the colored wanted to hear Just a Closer Walk With Thee.

Arteau’s funerals were something to see. Everybody looked forward to them. Folks in Dancyville would say, Lord have mercy, Arteau Guntop can make a body wanna be dead.

I hope he does mine, if he’s still among the living.

Lots of white folks wanted the colored choir.

Daddy always said there was something about colored music that hits a white man where he lives, the sons of the deceased would tell Arteau and he would give a knowing nod and say, Well, now, whatever y’all and your mama want. Ain’t nothing else in the world that matters to us.

Of course there was always one group who wouldn’t fit in and that was the Presbyterians. Arteau said hymns like Have Thine own Way, Lord; Come Ye Disconsolate, Where ere Ye Languish; or Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us were so bad even the white boys could barely stand it.

But Presbyterians do have more money, and money answereth all things, as Arteau often pointed out.

He usually pointed this out when he had three or four drinks in him at the Happy Landings Cafe a few miles north of Dancyville where the Nashville and Birmingham Railroad crossed the Loosahatchie River.

That’s what Aaron told me.

(Aaron and I lived here together at the Take Your Rest old folks home before he died, and he talked like a waterfall.)

I reckon the chances of any Presbyterians being at the Happy Landings were slim. Dancyville Presbyterians drank in their closets, and they never drank in front of each other.

Honey Boy’s body was wrapped in quilts. A red high heel peeked out until Lamont eased it back under a blanket and quietly closed the doors of the hearse.

Arteau stood by the passenger door, supervising, commenting.

A moon-faced man in faded blue coveralls and brogan shoes with a grin like a possum asked after who had died. Arteau murmured, Rather not say just this yet, there’ll be an announcement.

One thing was for sure. Honey Boy would not be laid out in an open coffin behind the picture window with the pulled black drapes where the more prominent deceased were displayed — so folks going by the Ultimate Celestial Funeral Home on Jefferson Street could see who had died. Arteau was certain of that.

Lamont lingered at the back of the hearse as Roosevelt opened the driver’s door and slid beneath the wheel. The moon-faced man with the grin sidled over and said, That’s a sharp looking suit you got on there, son.

Lamont held his head up, ran his fingers through his hair and adjusted his collar button. This is one sharp sumbitch standing here in it, he said, freckles aflame, Adam’s apple bobbing.

Where’d you get it?

Lamont shrugged his shoulders and said, Well, sir, if you must know, this soldier from Fort Campbell got drunk and hit a bridge over here by Dyersburg last week.

A blonde little girl in a pink sundress petted the cat, which rubbed against her legs, purring, and asked whose kitty it was.

Yours if you want her, Honey, Arteau said, tipping his hat as he opened the door. She’s alone in the wicked world.

He climbed onto the high front seat with Lamont close behind him, and said, Step on it, boys, before we draw a bigger crowd.

Who that girl in the back? said Roosevelt, pulling on the big leather covered steering wheel. The black hearse moved away from the curb like a river barge nosing into the current.

That girl in the back is Riley Dupree Cunningham, Arteau said, jamming a Picayune into his mouth. Folks who knew him best called him Honey Boy. He took poison because love went bad.

Now I gotta put him on ice, go up to Miss Ida Dupree’s place, walk across her lawn, which is bigger than Kansas, climb the stairs, go into that upstairs room where she’s been brooding ever since Lavinia Princess killed herself in 1935, and tell her about her only grandson. And believe me, boys, I’d rather fondle a bobcat in a phone booth with a handful of thumbtacks.

The hearse glided off, the pale red light on the roof flickering softly.

Sam watched the hearse drive away and walked down the sidewalk toward the courthouse, past the fish market and its tangy smell.

Duncan Swain was washing down the sidewalk with a hissing garden hose.

Honey Boy’s yellow cat came creeping up and Duncan, who watched the hearse drive by, doused the cat without even looking in her direction and she yowled away. Hello, Sam, he said. Y’all find some bad news?

Afraid so, Sam said. Can’t talk now.

The radio on the counter of the fish market played:

You wanna be my man

You gotta gimme forty dollars down

You wanna be my man

You gotta gimme forty dollars down

You won’t be my man

Your baby gonna leave this town

Across Broad Street, the marquee of the Ritz movie theater said Gentleman’s Agreement.

Country men gathered in tight, talkative knots in the alley between the movie and the Little Pig Cafe, shooting dice, drinking white whiskey out of Nehi bottles, and looking suspiciously over their shoulders at the town people walking by on the sidewalk.

People were ordering barbecues and fish sandwiches with hot sauce at the counter of the Little Pig, which was snug against the rear of the bank, like a piglet nestled against the flank of a sow.

Pickup trucks lined the curb at the courthouse, piled with peaches, okra, watermelons, tomatoes, butterbeans, honey, green beans, black-eyed peas, cucumbers, sweet corn and eggs.

The Confederate soldier statue stood on a granite pedestal in front of the two-story, brick courthouse. Below him was a cannon from Fort Pillow, pointing down Broad. The soldier saluted with his left hand. People called it Miss Minnie Waldon’s Rebel soldier, after the Confederate widow who raised the money to erect it.

The old checkers players who sat under the courthouse portico, come rain, come shine, had told Sam that Minnie Waldon always said the soldier was shading his eyes from the sun.

Or maybe he’s looking for General Grant, one of them said. He went thataway, heading towards Shiloh when he come through town a while back. He didn’t stay long, but folks heard him coming and they heard him going away.

Off the southwest corner of the square — at Broad and Washington — was Wilson Reeves’ s Corner Drug Store, the only business in town with a neon sign, which flashed orange in the green window: Fountain service, drink Dr. Pepper at 10, 2 and 4.

Sam waved at the old Rebel, and went into the Corner Drug Store, cheerful, even though minutes before he had been with a perfumed corpse, because he had a story for his newspaper.

When a man is very young, youth is the sunshine in his heart, everything else in his life orbits around that. Life is like a dream when you’re young, then later it gets so serious.

Sam was a very young man at that time, and he knew in his heart that he would never die.

2

APRIL 1923, MARION

The spirit of the Lord filleth the Earth, the old preacher said, head bowed, hands outstretched.

That was the first time I ever laid eyes on Marion Whitlow, standing by his Daddy’s grave that warm, spring day in 1923. All around him nature, lush in a hazy dabble of pink, green and blue, held her breath, ready to run riot. The fields sprang green in the moist breezes that carried the smell of fresh turned ground. The blind, kicking calf in the womb made the cow’s udder spurt white drops. The dogwoods glowed white and pink, marked by God, folks say, to signify for them, to bring to mind the blood of Jesus.

The insects swarmed in clouds. The unborn fledgling pecked the tiny eggshell, opening up the door to the light of the huge world, opening the door to death.

The female dogs were in heat, and the packs of hounds, their dangling maleness showing blood red, followed the bitches in packs, rolling their yellow eyes and showing each other curved white teeth.

Wispy clouds rippled the sky. The Loosahatchie, flush with winter rains, ran dark and deep beneath a chalky bluff, which was mottled with streaks of rusty red clay that showed like tiny blood vessels under the skin.

The country cemetery on the north bluff looked out over the river. The south bank below was a flooded forest of mossy cypress, dark oaks and scaly barked hickories. Beyond that, shining in the sun, lay the green fields that surrounded Dancyville.

Marion looked at his calloused, dirty toes as they lowered his father’s coffin into the grave. The coffin scraped and bumped and made a lonesome sound. Marion wore faded denim and carried a cracked leather grip that held a blue and red rag quilt and a King James Bible with Honor Thy Father and Mother written in his dead mother’s spidery hand on the flyleaf.

Our bones are scattered at the grave’s mouth, as when one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth, the old preacher said. But mine eyes are upon Thee, Oh God the Lord, leave not my soul destitute.

Marion told me that what he remembered as he watched them lower the coffin was being so small back in Missouri, maybe five years old, sitting on a stump with his father. Sitting on the stump in the muddy yard of their log house, listening to his mother’s breathing, as she lay in the back room.

Her wheezing had a grating gasp to it, as if someone was running a rasp over a rough piece of wood, running it over again and again, but every stroke coming a little slower, a little harder.

It was the first thing in his life he remembered clearly, sitting on the stump and knowing his mother was dying.

Marion never said much, but when he did, it meant a lot. At least it did to me.

He had watched some men carry his mother out the front door. They had wrapped her in a gray, wool blanket and her hand hung out like a doll’s hand, white, frail and broken. Goodbye, the hand said, goodbye to the tender touch, the loving smile, the soft warm place you could run to where every tear was kissed away, every trouble tended, every hurt soothed.

He had dreamed about it since, that cracked, china doll’s hand. And he had dreamed of this day too, he said, but dreamed of it before it happened. The dream memory with its feel of cold dirt, its scraping coffin sound and high, lonesome feeling ran all through him now. Somewhere the soft dream and the solid world touched each other, but he didn’t know where that place was.

He was 16. Time to be big.

As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, as the birds that are trapped in the snare, so it is with the sons of men, who are snared in an evil time that falleth suddenly upon them, the old preacher said.

The people by the grave, me and Lawson among ‘em, said, Amen.

The people prayed for courage, prayed for strength, prayed for mercy. We didn’t know it, but mercy was our sorest need. Marion hardly knew them. The people had come because they heard about the funeral and were afraid no one else would come, and that would be a shame.

Marion and his father had moved to Tennessee, across the Mississippi, because old Mr. Whitlow had gone broke. More broke than the 10 Commandments, the Missouri people said of them when they went away in a creaking wagon with a cast-iron skillet and a lantern hanging off the back.

Came here to sharecrop, and then his daddy took the malarial fever and died, and Marion had walked to the landowner’s house to borrow money for a coffin.

His daddy had been yelling about a fire in a barn the last day, God damn it, why wouldn’t somebody come help him get the horses out of the barn? The barn was burning and the horses were screaming, hurling themselves against the stalls, kicking the walls down. Jesus, couldn’t anybody else but him hear the horses screaming?

Marion kept wiping his father’s face with cool water, talking to him, telling him he was going to get well.

Shoulda never left, Mr. Whitlow said sadly, staring at the tarpaper ceiling with his fever-broken eyes. Shoulda never left home.

Marion turned and looked out over the bluff again, at the silent river. The water alive, wounded by every breeze. A riff of white birds gently exploded from somewhere beneath the bluff, and whispered across the face of the dark water, moving like a thunderbolt on tiptoe, all swoop and wing, like a cry in your sleep, like a shout in the night.

Those of us standing at the grave sang, our voices rolling away with the river and the wind. Singing a hymn I dearly love:

Heaven is a beautiful place, I am told

Heaven is a beautiful place, I am told

That’s the reason why

we ain’t afraid to die

Heaven is a beautiful place, I am told.

The blurring of birds took rise and were carried away like a flood, soaring over tender, green forest. It gave me a great feeling of emptiness, like saying, Oh, my God. How could You hang the world on nothing?

Marion was no stranger to hunger or fear, but he had never been alone. Now he knew that great lostness.

Folks were walking away from him now, climbing into splintered wagons behind mules that stood silent as ghosts, ear-back stubborn, waiting for the slap of the sweat-soaked leather reins.

They were climbing into rusty trucks that started with grinding chokes and sputters. The children stared at him open faced and curious, wondering what he was gonna do now. The grown folks gave him guilty glances or didn’t look at all.

I sat on the wagon seat and looked right into him. I could see into his heart and I knew there wasn’t no bad in that boy.

I was in my 20s then. I’d worn my hair braided for modesty’s sake, and had on a black dress with a blue shawl. Liz and Sally fidgeted and picked at each other in the wagon bed behind me.

Lawson sat on the wagon seat next to me, taking up the reins. Lord, he was so young then, with such an earnest, sober face. He already had a world on his shoulders with a wife and two children. I put my hand on his and whispered to him.

Marion told me later he knew right then what I was saying to Lawson.

Lawson shot Marion a startled, perplexed look – like it was the first time he had really noticed him - and looked back at me. How on Earth? he hissed. How we gonna feed him?

Lawson looked at Marion again. Marion looked away, shuffled his bare feet and turned back to the mounded grave.

The preacher said a few words to Marion, patted him on the shoulder and walked off.

Presently Marion heard the wagon creak, steps on the soft ground behind him and felt Lawson taking the grip from his hand.

You come on with us now, Son, Lawson said. You come with us.

3

MARCH 1948, SAM

Sam told me that on Conley Avenue in Columbia, Missouri, right across from Jesse Hall at the University of Missouri, there’s a beer joint called the Shack.

It’s made of knothole lumber and has a green door. With low ceilings and booths made from the wooden seats of the street cars sold for scrap when they tore up the trolley tracks in Columbia.

Football pennants all over the walls. Tigers-15, Jayhawks-13. Sugar Bowl Fordham- 2, Missouri-0, New Year’s Day 1942.

The jukebox plays swing music, country-western and a song called Fight Tiger. Six tunes for a dime, Sam said. If a boy took his best girl to the Shack for a 10 cent beer and a 15 cent hamburger and carved his and her initials on the back of one of those booths, that pretty much meant that she was his girl. (I can think of sweeter ways to court a girl, but I never went to college.)

Evidently in March of 1948, a body could walk through that green door and find SR whittled on every booth and table. All with different girls’ initials. Sam Rave spent a lot more time in the Shack than he did in class, which was the reason the Dean, Elmer Louver, summoned him to his office in Walter Williams Hall one spring day when Sam could smell the rain coming.

Dean Louver was in a brown suit that looked like he wore it to interview Kaiser Wilhelm, Sam said.

Sam, he said, looking over his glasses, have you seen the majestic six columns in the middle of the Quadrangle, the ones left when Academic Hall burned down in 1892?

The Dean was not one to shilly-shally.

Yes sir, I certainly have.

Would be pretty hard to miss ‘em, Sam said, a little piece of the Acropolis standing out in a cow pasture in the middle of Boone County, Missouri.

Our monument, Dean Louver said, a symbol of learning, of striving for wisdom, here at the oldest state university west of the Mississippi.

Yes sir.

He held Sam’s grade report in front of him, at arm’s length, like it might be catching. Your grades are not majestic, Sam, Dean Louver said, to put it mildly. You think we’re going to raise another column in tribute to your time here at the world’s oldest and most famous School of Journalism?

No sir, Dean, I am afraid we are not.

Sam knew what was coming, it was coming sure as the rain. They talked a while and it was decided that maybe Sam should apply for a job at the Dancyville Daily Morning Democrat in Dancyville, Tennessee, which was advertised in a trade magazine that Dean Louver happened to be perusing that morning.

He read the ad aloud in his best lectern voice:

Reporter: police beat, obits, sports, features, society, food and church news. Carve out your own spot, great job for enthusiastic go-getter who wants to get started in a newspaper career. No experience necessary. Salary, good hunting and fishing.

That means you’ll have to hunt and fish to eat, Dean Louver said. But go on down there, young Mr. Rave. The publisher is named Aaron Reuben Douglass and he can teach you a lot about the newspaper world if you look and listen.

The Dean said he would write Mr. Douglass about Sam. Bright, young Sam Rave.

No hard feelings.

Sam knew that he had flunked out, that’s all. Maybe this Tennessee thing would pan out. He much preferred going down to Tennessee to returning to Springfield and telling his Uncle Justin Rave, a big landowner who loved a dollar, that he had wasted the tuition money.

I may not be electrifying, Sam used to say, but I am like electricity in one regard: I follow the path of least resistance.

Louver walked Sam to the door with a gentle hand on his shoulder. A gray-haired secretary with the eyeglasses hanging from a gold chain to her ample bosom smiled and said, Good luck, Sam.

Maybe you could lay out a while and come back and try again in a few years, Sam, the Dean said. Lots of young fellows do that. Nothing to hang your head about.

The rains came. Students on the sidewalks were opening black umbrellas. That was another thing about college Sam said he never got the hang of —remembering to carry an umbrella because you walked everywhere.

He walked across the spongy Quadrangle, past those stone columns Louver was so proud of you’d think he pushed them up there himself, left wet footprints on the shiny floor in Jesse Hall — beneath that august Jeffersonian dome — and walked out the other side.

He crossed Conley Avenue, the red bricks were slick and the rain was ankle deep in the gutters, heading for the Shack to tell Mick that he was leaving town.

Mick was an ex-convict who claimed he knew Pretty Boy Floyd when they were in the Jefferson City penitentiary together, before Pretty Boy got his name up.

He told me he was in a whorehouse in Kansas City with the Barkers, Mick always said, and the madam came out, looked at him and said, Who do you want, Pretty Boy?

But he didn’t like that name. Said it made him mad. He told me to call him Choc, which I did. You didn’t wanna make that Oklahoma Bad Boy mad at you.

When Sam pushed the door open that day, Mick called out, Come on in, Sambo, it’s raining pitchforks and nigger babies.

The jukebox was playing Move It On Over.

Mick looked rough, but Sam said he had never really hurt anybody. He went to prison for stealing and then he stayed in trouble after that because he couldn’t stop writing bad checks when he was drinking, and he drank all the time. They called him Paper Hanger Mick.

Sam had paper with Mick himself. Mick was big and easy with credit if he liked you, and he liked Sam Rave. Sam was always lucky that way, people liked him.

Mick had curly black hair, was lantern-jawed, and always needed a shave. He wore a green GI issue T-shirt and a red St. Louis Cardinals ball cap.

He had a baseball with a famous Dizzy Dean’s autograph on it in a glass box behind the bar. Sam told me more than once that Mick thought Earl Averill’s line drive breaking Dizzy Dean’s toe in the 1937 All Star game was the worst thing to happen in Missouri since the New Madrid Earthquake.

Mick jerked his thumb at the red and yellow jukebox and said, I tell you something, Sambo, that Williams kid is gonna be the hottest thing to ever come outta Alabama, hotter than Joe Louis.

Hotter than Tallulah Bankhead? Sam said.

Mick evidently bore an unnatural passion for Tallulah.

One night, he’d say when he was good and drunk, if I could have one night with Tallulah Bankhead in the Daniel Boone Hotel, they could cut me after that. I’d give ‘em up.

Sam had a couple of bottles of Busch, a cheeseburger with fries and a bowl of chili with onions. He signed for it.

Then he told Mick he was leaving. Easing on down to Tennessee, Sam said, to work on a country newspaper.

Graduating in two years, Mick said, looking at Sam’s tab in his ledger. A Mizzou boy wonder. They must be swole up with pride over there at Jesse.

They tell me if I ever graduate, Sam said, it’ll be lawdyhowcome.

Mick snorted, still frowning at the ledger.

What’s my tab? Sam said, I’ll send you the money when I’m working.

Sure, Sambo, Mick said. And Tallulah’s gonna call me from the Salt Lick Suite at the Daniel Boone any minute now.

No, really, Sam told him. I will.

Mick squinted and put his big thumb on the greasy page. Call it 14 bucks, he said. I gotta leave you something for gas.

I’m riding the Wabash, Sam said. Got my ticket.

Got my bag, got my reservation, Mick sang.

When Sam opened the door the sun had come out. Blackbirds were hopping and cawing in the street. Mick called after him as he walked down the wet sidewalk.

You coming back someday, Sambo?

Sam smiled and waved. It gave him a sweet, lonesome feeling.

Oh well, Uncle Justin always said life wasn’t nothing but sailors singing on a sinking ship.

After he got to Dancyville and started working at the paper for $25 a week, Sam mailed Mick a Thomas Jefferson $2 bill every Saturday for seven weeks until he paid him off.

That’s the kinda boy Sam Rave was.

4

DEC. 24, 1977, CIVVY

Well, praise God, here it comes. Another day that the Lord made, rejoice, be glad.

Look at me, still here. Sitting on this porch at the Take Your Rest Home on Estonallie Road. Looking out across the yard and the great large pecan trees and the sweet gums all gray and bare now, across the road, past brown and yellow fields rising, running off toward the bluff where we used to walk along, then the steep drop through the oak, hickory, and cypress trees and down to the wide river in the far-off and the bottom land running out for miles and miles.

All the rivers run unto the sea, and yet the sea is not full.

Being still and waiting on the sun is the best time of the day. Sunrise, sunset — all over the world — one or the other is happening all the time. Dawn and darkness. They don’t fight each other. They don’t tarry. Endless, like a beautiful blue and gold cloth with no seam. The sun also riseth and goeth down and hurries back to the place where he arose.

All the black branches of the trees off yonder over the Loosahatchie Bottom. Dark and brittle like cold fingers, hungry, yearning, reaching up, reaching up, and the thundering sun cracking first light. Busting over the edge of the world like runaway horses.

Dawn brings joy. All the creatures in the wood raise their voices. Yonder, here it comes, here it comes. Every creature is glad.

The burning edge of that red and yellow flame soaring. Fearless and proud, because there is no room for fear in the heart that loves God.

It makes a body serene in the mind to be still.

I can hear the Earth’s soft breathing now, hear the bird calls crackling and the animals stirring. I feel like I could hear anything this time of day, like I could hear a coon crawling out of a hollow stump a mile away. How he uncoils hisself from sleep, shakes hisself, ambles down to the green water to wash his paws and start his day, lolling off through the brush with his masked black eyes and his sassy ringed tail.

Abishag Tucker, the kitchen help, comes out now to where I’m sitting wrapped in the pink and blue quilt she made for me. She squints, trying to find me, then sees me, puts her sweet brown face up next to mine.

Sister Civvy, uh, huh, huh, huh, you sweet old soul, look at yourself, up and dressed with your face washed and your hair combed here at daybreak. Why, Honey, you even got your lipstick on. You waiting for some little ole man? And all the others still sleeping away. You sit right there, but I ain’t got time to be bringing no old sisters no coffee.

She brings me strong coffee and sweet cream, brown and gold in the pretty blue cup with a pink flower painted on it — steaming. Brown bread and butter with honey.

Abishag always does that. She’s contrary, says she ain’t gonna do a thing, then does it. It’s a curiosity to me.

I been here at Take Your Rest since 1962. I was hoeing in my garden early one morning and I felt this terrible pain in my head. So bad I doubled up. There was a light — a hot, blinding light — and when I came to myself, lying there in the garden, I could hardly move. I don’t know how long I was there.

I got out in the road somehow and sat there until somebody came along.

I haven’t been able to speak a word since, and I have to shuffle along, can’t do much of nothing no more.

It was like God said, Well, Civvy, I expect you had your say. You’ve spoken to the subject at hand quite well enough, thank you very much. Now you sit and listen.

The other day that simple-minded girl Patricia Hicks, I heard her telling the other help, Oh, baby, if they was all like Miss Civvy, wouldn’t be no never mind to this job. She’s so accommodating. All she wants to do is sit on the