Finally Mrs. Barrett looked up, more in control of herself now. When she spoke, her voice was firm and had a stem, lecturing tone. “Marital relations, Sheriff Rhodes, are meant for the purpose of having children, creating a family. I had always hoped to have children of my own, but we never did, Hod and I. Then I had to have an operation. After that, a family wasn’t possible. Do you understand?”
Rhodes shook his head affirmatively, though he wasn’t sure he did. Did she think that he might not know about hysterectomies? Or did she think he might not understand about a family?
Mrs. Barrett, however, accepted the head shake and continued the lecture. “The Bible tells us that marriage-and what goes with it-is for the purpose of being fruitful, of bringing issue into the world. If you can’t do that, then. . relations are unnecessary. Oh, there are those”-her voice began to rise-”there are those, I know there are those, who use the flesh for other means, who defile the purity of the flesh for pleasure, but they shall have their reward! They shall be purified in the refiner’s fire! They shall. .”
She stopped suddenly to look at Rhodes. The room seemed to echo with her voice.
“I see what you mean,” Rhodes said. For the first time he was getting a glimpse of Mrs. Barrett’s fervor, and he was beginning to understand why Hod went out walking. “Does your husband feel the same way?” he asked.
Mrs. Barrett spoke in her lecturing tone once more. “I’m afraid that Hod is not a purely Christian man,” she said. “He tries to be, I think, but he won’t go to my church with me. The Devil still has a little bit of a hold on him. He feels the call of the flesh, but that sin will be on his own head, not mine.”
Rhodes wondered about the church Mrs. Barrett must attend, but he didn’t ask. Instead he said, “Do you think Hod’s need for ‘the flesh’ might cause Hod to stray from the right path?” He might not be in the congregation of Mrs. Barrett’s church, but his upbringing had prepared him to talk to people like her in their own language.
“Hod has made errors in this life, Sheriff, as we all have, but I do not believe that he has strayed that far. Oh yes, I know what you must be thinking. You think that maybe he visited that floozie Jeanne for carnal pleasure. I could tell that you had that very thought in mind from the beginning.” Her voice was cold now, cold as one of the blue northers that swept down on Thurston from the Panhandle in January. “But I don’t believe he did. Surely he would not dare to transgress God’s law so openly.”
Rhodes stood up, and Mrs. Barrett immediately walked to the chair in which he had been sitting, straightening the antimacassar on the plump back.
“Well,” Rhodes said, “I guess that’s all for now Mrs. Barrett. You did know that Hod was going out at night, though?”
“Of course I knew, Sheriff, but I never said anything. A man may be a born deceiver, but sooner or later he deceives no one but himself.”
“That’s not from the Bible, is it?” said Rhodes as he stepped to the door and opened it.
“No,” Mrs. Barrett said. “No, that’s not from the Bible. That’s from me.”
As he drove away from the Barrett house, Rhodes thought again about Ivy Daniels. He hoped she didn’t feel like Mrs. Barrett, and he was pretty sure that she didn’t. He and Claire had shared a very satisfying sex life both before and after the birth of Kathy, and he had never seen anything irreligious about that.
In a matter of seconds he was back on Thurston’s main street, and he parked at Hod’s store. He got out and went in. Hod was sacking groceries and didn’t look up, so Rhodes stepped to the loafer’s bench. “Bill Tomkins been in today?” he said.
Larry Bell bent over and spit into his Styrofoam cup. “Yeah, Sheriff. He was in earlier.”
“Guess he’d be home, then, by now,” Rhodes said.
“Don’t know about that. Said he was goin’ fishing this morning.”
“At the lake or around here?”
“Round here. I think he’s probably at that tank used to serve the Thurston Gin.”
“Any fish in there?”
“Bass, mostly. Used to be some cats in there, but I haven’t heard of anybody takin’ one of them in years. Lots of little perch, too, but nobody cares ‘bout them.”
“Pretty good bass?” Rhodes was not merely making conversation. He had a real love of fishing for bass, but he seldom got the chance.
“Not bad. Old Bill took one out of there last week, ought to’ve gone three-four pounds.”
There hadn’t been a cotton gin in Thurston for forty years, but everyone still referred to the Thurston Gin Tank, a body of water about a tenth of a mile square (not round, as most stock tanks in the area), with a smaller connecting tank beside it.
Up north, they call them “ponds,” Rhodes thought as he drove up. He remembered some kids from New Jersey who had visited his family while he was growing up. He had offered to take them fishing in a local tank. “In a tank?” they had asked, incredulous. “You can’t fish in a tank!” Turned out they thought a tank was a big iron barrel. Well, the Gin Tank was hardly that.
The sides of it were dammed around with earth, ten feet higher than the surrounding pasture. Johnson grass, berry vines, milkweed, Bermuda grass, and who knew what else grew in profusion over the pasture and the dam. Willow trees that no one had planted had grown up all over the dam, looking for the water that they needed so desperately in the heat of the summer months. On one side of the dam, the east side, there was a break that was bridged by several rotting planks. Water flowed under the planks from one tank to the other.
The old gin property was not fenced. It covered several acres of land just off the main road, within sight of the stores and homes of Thurston. The family that owned the land had long since moved to the city, but they refused to sell the property. They held out fond hopes that one day oil or gas would be discovered in the Thurston area, not a very likely possibility to Rhodes’s mind, so they kept the land and paid their taxes with regularity. In the meantime, they had no intention of putting out any money on upkeep; the land was unfenced, and anyone who wanted to fish in the tank was welcome to do so.
Rhodes drove up as near the dam as he could get and parked his cruiser, leaving behind him two lines of crushed grass and weeds. He couldn’t see anyone on the dam, but there was the old gray Chevrolet that Tomkins had driven up to Barrett’s store the other day parked not far from a big hackberry tree. Rhodes got out of the car and started up on the dam. Beggar lice stuck to his pants legs, and he was sure that chiggers were leaping from the Johnson grass by the thousands to bury their heads in his flesh. It made him itch just to think about it, but there was nothing he could do.
When he got to the top of the dam he looked around. Tomkins was on the other side of the tank, in a shady spot between two willow trees. There was a camp stool nearby, but Tomkins was standing up with a cane pole under his left arm. With his right hand he was putting a large shiner on a hook. As Rhodes watched, he tossed the shiner out into the tank. After it hit and sank, a red and white plastic cork bobbed on the surface of the water.
Rhodes was mindful of the fisherman’s etiquette that required him to remain silent to avoid scaring the fish. Rhodes wasn’t sure he believed that noise made any difference, but he walked as silently as he could around the dam to where Tomkins was. By the time he got there, Tomkins was seated on the folding stool and casting a spinner bait into the tank with a cheap black rod and Zebco 33 reel.
“How’re they biting?” Rhodes asked, hunkering down by Tomkins.
“So-so,” Tomkins wheezed in his asthmatic way. “Stringer’s over there.” He indicated a stick anchored in the mud.
Rhodes walked over to the stick and saw that a nylon line was tied to it. He pulled up the line. As it emerged from the slightly muddy brown water, he saw, and felt, the fish. There were three, the line running through their gills and mouths. Two were fairly small, but the third weighed about three pounds. The water rolled off their scales, making them shine in the rays of the sun that came through the willow branches.