Andy Tevis bit off a chew of tobacco, softened it in his mouth and chewed on it. He spat at a brass cuspidor, missed. He said, “I was starting up to turn around back to Route 16 when I heard this screeching that would curdle up your marrow. It was the Scarecrow calling to me. She was standing back there in the doorway and waving her skinny arms at me to come in. Well, I didn’t want to, but I went.”
He spat another brown stream and hit the mark this time. The cuspidor rang like a tiny bell. Andy shook his head. “First time I was ever inside. Never saw nothing in all my life to equal it. Broken-down furniture and dust thick on everything and empty corn-squeezings jugs all over the place and a stink to make you wish your head was stuffed. I tell you that woman’s plumb crazy daft, and don’t lose no bets on it. She made me come inside and set down and didn’t say nothing about her old man being deader’n a doornail all the time. She said I had to have a cup of tea with her, and nothing I could tell her would stop her from brewing me one. Honest to God, I got right sick, just looking at her. Part of the rags she was covered with was plain old burlap bags, I swear it. And it’s a living cinch she hadn’t washed herself all over in a year, but there she was brewing me a cup of tea, like she was some fine lady in a big, white house. She got some cups out of an old trunk and told me they were the fine china she’d got for a wedding present. At least she washed them and they wasn’t broken up like everything else in the place. Then she give me this cup of tea and said maybe I’d like some brandy in it! Brandy! She said it was from her father’s cellars. Hell, old man Parsons didn’t have nothing but the chamber pot beneath his bed when he passed away.”
Andy spat and nodded with satisfaction when the cuspidor rang. “The brandy she gave me was the corn-squeezings old Jeff made in his still. Then she told me. She said she was planning to do a lot of entertaining now that her husband was dead. She said she wanted me to invite all her friends from town out to see her. She mentioned you especially, Sheriff, by the way. Then she told me her husband had got drunk and beat her up and then stumbled up to the cliff and fallen off into Winding River some five-six-seven days ago, she wasn’t quite sure when. I asked her why she hadn’t reported it to the authorities, and she said she couldn’t walk fourteen miles to town and that the old Model T that’s rusting on the place didn’t run no more and she didn’t know how to drive it if it did. So I gulped down the tea and corn squeezings and finished up my route and come into tell you to get up there.”
Charley Estes said, “Poor Martha. I was right sweet on her when I was young but I couldn’t marry her because I was working in the livery stable and studying correspondence courses and didn’t have an extra pair of britches to my name. Jeff Purdy had just been left a little money and old man Parsons married Martha off to him. She was pushing twenty, maybe and Jeff was forty-up. They had a good farm for awhile in east Jarrod County, but Jeff drunk that and all the money up and moved out to that Rocky Farm on the river that no redneck’s ever scrubbed a living out of in fifty years. They been there ever since. You reckon the poor woman’s had anything to eat, even, since the old bastard died?”
Andy Tevis said, “She said there was some side meat in the smoke house. She’s been eating off of that and turnip greens.”
“Poor Martha,” Charley Estes said, picking up his cards and scrutinizing them.
“Ain’t you even going out there?” Andy Tevis asked.
“Sure,” said the sheriff. “I’ll have to get Martha and bring her back here and find some place we can keep her. She can’t live out there all alone if she’s as bad off as you say. But there ain’t no hurry. He’s been dead a week, he’ll stay dead till we finish this game. Coates is six bits up on me.”
Coates picked up his cards and they resumed their game of cribbage. The taut little mail carrier stood by, fidgeting. Finally he said, “Charley, you think she killed her old man?”
Charley Estes played a card and grinned. He said, “How do you like that, Coates?” He turned to Andy Tevis, said, “I guess maybe I’ll have to ask her while I’m up there.”
Tevis spat at the cuspidor, turned his back on the card players and left the office in disgust. He was glad it was court day. There would be plenty of rednecks at Dan Squires’ saloon who would listen to his story.
The sheriff and his deputy finished their game unhurriedly, and in the end, Charley Estes regained his losses and won a dollar-ten. They put on mackinaws because it was early spring and there was still a chill in the air and it was getting on toward late afternoon now. They left the office and piled into a 1952 Buick sedan outside the building.
Coates said, “Think we ought to pick up the coroner?”
Charley Estes shook his head. “If he’s in the river, there ain’t no body, and if there ain’t no body we don’t need a coroner,” he answered.
They drove to the east end of the town and the plankings of the old covered bridge over Clear Creek set up a thunderous rattling as they crossed it to reach the high-crowned road called Route 16. They drove in silence for awhile, both seeming at peace with the red-gashed southern clay that formed the country landscape. At length Coates Williams spoke.
“Charley, you think this could really be a murder?”
Estes shrugged. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “God knows, she had reason enough to kill him. It was a scandal the way he used her all their married life. Just after they moved to Rocky Farm she was going to have a child, but he wouldn’t call a doctor in. Delivered the baby himself, I heard, and it was stillborn. Martha almost died, too. She had black eyes and broken arms from his beatings half the time. Once a fellow who’d been fishing in Winding River drove by there and he swore he heard screaming and saw Martha tied up to a post like an animal and old Purdy was blazing drunk and stripping the clothes right off her with a blacksnake whip. Then he got himself a hired girl from the county orphanage a long time ago. No more than fifteen, she was. He used to come into Squires’ saloon on Saturdays in those days and he’d brag how he’d kicked Martha — the Scarecrow he called her, by then — out of his bed and taken the hired girl in to keep him warm. I flattened him with my fist once for calling her the Scarecrow. He starved her. It’s no wonder she got skinny and lost her looks.”
“I can’t remember ever seeing him, even,” Coates said.
“You’re young,” Charley replied. “He couldn’t get more credit and he quit coming to town. He didn’t do nothing much but make moonshine in that still of his. Sold some, but drunk most. He had some pigs for meat and turnips and weeds for poke salad and he got his kicks, after the hired girl run away, just torturing poor Martha. He was the meanest man who ever lived.”
“It sounds like murder, all right,” Coates declared.
“Maybe,” said Charley, his face tight. “But it might be kind of hard to prove.”
They drove for ten miles on the highway. Finally they came to a rutted, red-clay road that was littered with boulders as large as a man’s head. Charley turned the car north on the dirt road.
“Jesus!” said Coates. “We need an Army tank for this.”
The car jarred and jolted and careened over the dirt road. Once they hit a boulder and had to stop entirely after they almost skidded into the ditch. There was no sign of life except for a red fox that scurried across the road in front of them. It took them longer to cover the four miles than it had taken for ten on the highway. It was twilight when Rocky Farm came into view.