1977
A meeting
took place in a smoke-filled room in a back office of the Jackson City Sentinel.
Marvin Rosenbush sat behind a desk, chewing on the end of a cigar. In his cowboy boots, bell-bottom jeans, and
Aerosmith t-shirt, he wasn’t the stereotypical image of a newspaper editor. He looked too young both for the desk and the
cigar, and to Jim—only a year younger, just as shaggy-haired and unshaven—it
felt as if the inmates had taken over the asylum.
“What about
the link to the voodoo group down in New Orleans?” Marvin asked. “What are they called?”
“The Seven
Sisters,” Jim said. “I haven’t been able
to find anything. I think it’s a
hoax.”
Not many
years ago, the editor of the town’s only newspaper would have been a
middle-aged white man, probably bald, and wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and
a button-down shirt and tie to the office.
Ostensibly, he would be a Christian, though he might hold the views of
an agnostic or an atheist in private.
Never would he be a person in his early twenties and never a Jew. Never a Jew!
But this was different world and people were starting to do things
differently, even in the South. It
seemed to Jim that they were able to make it up as they went along.
Like
Marvin, Jim failed to adhere to stereotypes.
He was pudgy both in face and body.
His hair was thick and curly, approaching a state of ‘fro, and he
sported the earliest traces of a beard on the edge of his chin and jawline.
“It’s the
kind of hoax that sells newspapers,” Marvin said. He swiveled in his chair in little
half-circles, anchored in place by his boots propped on his desk. He blew a plume of smoke into the air above
his head.
“If it’s
not true then I don’t think we should report it,” Jim said.
“I see,”
said Marvin. “You’re a moralist.”
“It’s just so
random and stupid. I never heard anyone
talk about voodoo until this week, and now suddenly I’m hearing about it
everywhere.”
“Well, if
it is being said, then you can report that it’s being said. That still qualifies as journalism.”
Jim shook
his head as he looked down at his notes.
“Okay, so what about the funeral?”
“Cover that
too.”
“Right,”
Jim said. “Anything else?”
“Maybe you
should bring a camera.”
“To a
funeral?”
“I’m
hearing a lot of talk. Besides, it’s
Ernie Smith’s funeral home, and that place has a sordid reputation. There’s a chance something could happen. We don’t want to miss an opportunity.”
“Don’t you
think, with my complexion, I’m going to stick out enough as it is? I don’t need a camera around my neck
too. Besides, the police will be
there. I seriously doubt anything will
happen.”
“You’re
probably right.” Marvin held the cigar
in his mouth, spinning it between his thumb and forefinger. “But
if, on the off chance, anything does happen, we’d have a major competitive edge
if we had a camera there.”
Jim was
right to think he would be noticed. When
he stepped into the funeral home the next day, it seemed to him that two hundred
people turned their heads and stared.
His was the only white face among the sea of mourners. He was the only reporter. And he was certainly the only person carrying
a bulky leather haversack.
“It looks
like a purse,” he’d complained to Marvin when it was given to him.
“It’s the
seventies. Men where purses now.”
“Not to a
funeral!” His head dropped into his
hands. “Why am I arguing about
this? I’m not going to carry a camera
and I’m not going to wear a purse.”
“You’re
right,” Marvin said. “It’s not a
purse. It’s a haversack.”
Jim tried
to ignore the stares as he searched through the crowd for a place to sit. Every pew in the chapel was jammed with
people, fanning themselves with their bulletins.
The heat
outside was bad enough, but inside the brick building, without the benefit of
air conditioning and stuffed with people, it felt like he’d stepped into an
oven. Or Hell. Already, water beaded on
his forehead and he could feel the stains growing in the pits of his shirt. His necktie gripped him in a chokehold.
Beyond the
pews, it was standing room only, with at least three muddled rows of
acquaintances of the family and other assorted gawkers. Jim thought he spotted an empty space along
the back wall, and he headed in that direction.
“Excuse me,”
he whispered. He pinned the haversack against his back hip with
his hand as he slid through little openings in the crowd. He monitored the annoyed glances and
grimaces on the faces of those who allowed him to squeeze passed m, until finally
he landed in a small patch of floor he could call his own. It was just beneath a stained glass image of
the arch angel Gabriel.
He viewed
the chapel in the space between the heads of the people in front of him. The pulpit stood on a podium on the right
side of the room. On the far left side
was the organ, where some invisible organist played the introductory music. In between, placed on high in the center of
the back wall, hung a large wooden cross.
Below that, on the floor level, where it could be viewed by the walking
multitudes, was the casket. One section
had been opened, so that those who could get close enough could view the
deceased.
He turned
to his left toward a loud clanging sound and a ripple in the crowd. Two hundred other heads turned in unison and
watched as a police officer burst through the open doorway with his hand on his
holster.
“It’s
nothing,” someone said, waving him off.
“It was just a chair.” The
message passed in waves through the crowd.
“It was just a chair.” “A metal
chair.” “Someone dropped a folding chair,” until everyone was satisfied that
there was no cause for excitement. The
policeman relaxed his shoulders and removed his hand from his firearm. With order restored, he returned to his post.
“Why am I
even here?” Jim wondered. “What does
Marvin think will happen at a funeral?
Who would sully the memory of a sixteen-year-old girl on the day she is
put to rest?”
He already
knew what he was going to write: people were sad, the preacher said a few words.
(He would have to listen to the eulogy long enough to pull a quote or two.) Everyone
paid their respects to the girl.
Everyone was sad. The end. It hardly qualified as news.
As the buzz
of conversation faded, Jim noticed craned necks and heads turning toward the
center of the room. He bounced from toe
to toe jockeying for a position to see what was going on up by the casket.
A line had
formed and stretched from the open coffin to the chapel’s entrance. At the front of the line, someone wept loudly. Jim locked in on what appeared to be the
mother of the deceased leaning over her daughter’s body. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses,
with a black scarf twisted around her neck.
She was theatrical in her grief.
She threw herself into the casket and wrapped her arms around the
girl. “My baby,” she cried. “Oh my poor baby.”
No one
should ever have to bury a child, Jim thought.
His own mother had said the same thing to him after they put his brother
in the ground. His eyes followed the woman,
Cassandra, back to the second or third pew, where she disappeared from view.
Without the
benefit of an unobstructed view, Jim’s imagination would have to fill in the
blanks. She probably fell against the
red velvet cushion and covered her face with her arms. He could still hear her loud sobbing. Her husband would scoot next to her and
stretch his arm around her, allowing her to bury her head against his neck and
shoulder.
The
Reverend. Would he even show up? He’d always maintained his innocence, but if
you asked a hundred people in town who was the man that placed that girl under
the axle of a ’74 Lincoln Continental, ninety nine of them would name the
Reverend.
The common
narrative was that he’d placed her under the car, lined up her neck perpendicular
to the rotor, so that it practically took off her head when he kicked away the
jack stand, and the car came crashing down on her. In all likelihood, she was already dead by
then, strangled or suffocated. Nobody
goes under the car to change a tire.
As the last
of the line finished paying their respects, the other reverend in the room,
Reverend Tisdale, began his service.
“This is
the hard part,” Jim thought, “Paying attention to a Baptist minister during a
sermon.” He tried to focus on the words
coming out of the preacher’s mouth—something about Lucy going home to meet the
Lord—but church wasn’t a part of Jim’s constitution. His mind and his eyes traveled back to the
place where Reverend Baxter was most likely sitting, holding his wife—the
mother of the girl he had just murdered—, but he couldn’t see anything because
of the crowd.
Jim rubbed
the sleeve of his jacket across his forehead and sent drops of saline raining
down to the floor. “That’s it,” he
thought. “I’ve had enough.” If Arnold wanted someone to suffer through a
sermon in Hell, he should have done it himself.
Nothing here was newsworthy. As
quietly as he could, he slipped through the crowd and headed toward the
exit. The front doors were propped open
to let in a breeze, and went through them like he was entering the Promised
Land.
Then he
heard something, a scream. There was a
great commotion behind him, and suddenly there were more voices, more
screams. There was a quick clap clap clap
of gunshots. Jim ducked instinctively as
he turned back toward the chapel. The
doorway swelled with people. As soon as
they hit the open air, their formation broke and they ran in all
directions. The noise rose to a hysterical
pitch.
Jim’s
reportorial instincts kicked in then. “You
have to go back in there,” he told himself, but for the moment his loafers
remained cemented to the sidewalk. He took
a breath, and forced himself to move. He
would have to fight his way through the descending mob. He bounced into the current of panic-stricken
mourners like a surfer wading into the ocean.
All around him, people screamed and pushed and fought and elbowed passed,
and for a moment, Jim felt he would be swallowed in the melee. A smaller man would have been trampled.
He made
little progress until the crowd dispersed, but it wasn’t long. The chapel evacuated in less than a
minute. A pair of uniformed officers waited
with him, and as soon as there was room, they charged inside with pistols drawn.
Jim’s hand
slid into his handbag as he made his way into the chapel. It looked like Marvin would get his picture after
all.
About
This Novel; Chapter 1 ; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; Chapter 4; Chapter 5; Chapter 6; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Chapter 9; Chapter
10; Chapter
11;
Chapter
12;
Chapter
13; Chapter
14; Chapter
15; Chapter
16;
Chapter
17; Chapter
18; Chapter
19; Chapter
20; Chapter
21;
Blood
Cries at the Half-Way Point; Chapter
22;
Chapter
23
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