(“Don’t bet on it,” says Dwight Bryant. He’s the deputy sheriff here in Colleton County and might as well be another brother the way he feels free to smart mouth everything I do, even though I’m a district court judge and higher up in the judicial pecking order, technically speaking, than he is.)
What happened was I’d been holding court in the mountains near Asheville for a colleague who got called out suddenly for a family emergency. His elderly mother had wandered off from her nursing home and stayed missing two nights before they found her in a homeless shelter more than a hundred miles away in Atlanta, Georgia, alive and well and not a single clue as to how she got there.
It was early October and there’d been enough cool nights up in the mountains to color all their leaves; but down here in Dobbs, our flatland trees were just beginning to get the message that summer really was over.
I stopped by the courthouse that Wednesday evening to see if I was still scheduled to hold a commitment hearing the next morning out at Mental Health. A couple of white bailiffs were standing by my car when I came down the sun-warmed marble steps and one of them who knew I’d been away asked if I’d heard about the shooting.
“Past Cotton Grove on Old Forty-Eight,” said the bailiff who also knew that some of my daddy’s land borders that hard road south of Cotton Grove.
“Two niggers out from Raleigh killed a man as wouldn’t let ’em hunt on his land,” his fat-faced colleague interjected with relish.
I put my briefcase in the car, then turned and read the name tag pinned to the man’s brown uniform shirt.
“Niggers, Mr. Parrish?” I asked pleasantly. I was born and raised here in Colleton County and will no doubt die here, too, but I swear to God I’m never going to get used to the casual slurs of some people.
The other bailiff, Stanley Overby, gave me a sheepish smile as I said, “Use that word again, Mr. Parrish, and I’ll have your job.”
A dull brick red crept up from his tight collar, but I’m a judge and he’s not and the hot ugly words he really wanted to say came out in a huffy “Y’all excuse me. I got to get on home.”
As we watched him cross the street to the parking lot, Overby hitched up his pants around his own ample girth and said, “Don’t pay him any mind, Judge. He really don’t mean anything by it.”
I liked Overby and I knew he could be right. Parrish was probably nothing more than an equal opportunity bigot. Most of our bailiffs are like Overby—good decent men, augmenting a retirement pension that’s sometimes nothing but a Social Security check. Every once in a while though, we’ll get a Parrish, who, after a lifetime of taking orders himself, will put on that brown uniform and act like he’s just been put in charge of the world.
Black or white, at least half the people who get summoned to court through speeding tickets, misdemeanor subpoenas, or show-cause orders are there for the first time. They come in worried and unsure of themselves, they alternate between nervousness and embarrassment, and they certainly don’t know the procedures. It doesn’t help when the first person they approach with their timid questions is a surly-tongued white bailiff who either won’t give them the time of day or else treats them like chicken droppings.
Happily, someone overly officious doesn’t last too long. Not if Sheriff Bo Poole catches them at it.
“So who was it got himself shot?” I asked, not really concerned. If it’d been blood kin or a close friend, somebody in the family would’ve called me long before now.
“A Stancil man. Drove one of them big tractor-trailer trucks and—”
“Dallas Stancil?”
“You know him?”
“What happened?” I asked, too surprised to answer his question.
“Way I heard it, he went out to get in his truck yesterday morning and a couple of black fellows come up in a red pickup—Ford or Chevy. She couldn’t say which.”
“She?”
“His wife. She said it was the same two as he’d chased off his land Monday evening. She said they was talking and she commenced to make a fresh pot of coffee and then she heard gunshots and that pickup went screeching out of the yard. When she run out, he was laying dead next to his rig. Sheriff’s got a call out on the pickup but she couldn’t tell him a license plate or nothing.”
Again he looked at me curiously. “Did you know him, Judge?”
“A long, long time ago,” I said.
I should’ve either let it go, or phoned around my family for more solid information; but it was October and even if our trees hadn’t yet flamed red and gold, fall was in the air, and could be stirring up the ashes of things I’d just as soon my family didn’t remember.
Leaving Overby in the parking lot, I walked down the back stairs of the courthouse to the Sheriff’s Department, but Dwight wasn’t there. Nor was Sheriff Bo Poole.
I did ask a deputy if there’d been any development in the Stancil shooting, but he shrugged. “Last I heard, the body’s still over in Chapel Hill. Don’t know why it’s taking ’em so long. Two barrels at close range, what the heck they think killed him?”
What indeed?
Aunt Zell’s big white brick house sits on a quiet residential street six blocks from the courthouse. It was silent and empty when I let myself in a few minutes later because blues were running down at the coast and she and Uncle Ash had gone down to Harkers Island for a week of fishing. They’d taken Hambone with them, so I didn’t even have a dog to greet me.
Didn’t matter. I dumped my garment bag and briefcase on the deacon’s bench inside the door and headed straight down the hall for the deep freezer on the side porch. Like most women around here, Aunt Zell keeps two or three casseroles on hand at all times for emergencies, and the top one was baked chicken, garden peas, sliced hard-boiled eggs and mushroom soup with a drop-biscuit topping. She had thoughtfully printed the heating instructions on the outer layer of tinfoil in case the bereaved had too much perishable food on hand and wanted to wait till the next day to serve it.
I stuck it in an ice chest, which I carried back out to the car. On my way out of town, I stopped off at a 7-Eleven for a bag of ice and a couple of liters of chilled Pepsis and ginger ale. So many people always gather at the home of the deceased that they usually run out of drinks and ice halfway through the evening.
The preacher that lurks on the outer fringes of my mind nodded approvingly as I added my purchases to the ice chest, but the cynical pragmatist who shares headspace with him whispered, “Don’t you reckon Dallas’s wife might appreciate a pint of your daddy’s peach brandy more than a liter of Pepsi?”
“Unkind and unworthy,” murmured the preacher.
I only knew Dallas’s third wife, his widow now, by that sort of snide hearsay.
Hearsay said she’d been waiting tables at a truck stop in north Florida when Dallas pulled off I-95 for a late night hamburger about six or seven years ago.
“Hamburger?” one of my cattier sisters-in-law had snorted at the time. “That’s a new name for it. Big hair, big boobs, skinniest bee-hind I ever saw.”
“It’s them leopard print stirrup pants,” another sister-in-law said.
They were giggling about leopard pants when I came into the room.
“Who y’all trashing now?” I asked curiously.
They glanced at each other, then, careless-like, one said, “You remember that Dallas Stancil? He went and got himself a new wife with two half-grown young’uns. Third time lucky, maybe.”
I suppose they told me all the gossip they’d heard, but it barely registered.
Did I remember Dallas?
Oh, yes.
And as I drove through the gathering dusk of early October, I remembered him again.
Twelve or fifteen years older. A hard-drinking, hard-driving roughneck. Not the kind of man any of my brothers would want me associating with.