Phantom Nights (18 page)

He set his valise down on the station platform, took off his glasses, and rubbed coalsmoke-sensitive eyes with thumb and forefinger while he waited, like a man of import, for the crowd of mourners who had met the train to come to him. There were relatives of all ages, such as Mally's second cousin Verona with her brood, friends like Herschel "Poke Chop" Burdett, and a son of one of the owners of the funeral establishment, a plump, dapper young man named Dorsey Wundall, equally as well dressed, if in a more somber tone, as Ramses.

He had been away for a long time: since the early thirties. Most of the faces he recognized, some only at second glance. A couple of great aunts plucked at Ramses's sleeves while weeping, but no one embraced him. Ramses did not have the bearing of a man given to embraces in public.

He thanked them for coming. Dorsey Wundall introduced himself with appropriate condolences. Ramses looked sharply at him.

"Did your father receive my telegram?"

"Yes, sir. May I drive you to—"

"I would first like to see where it happened. Then you can take me to my daughter."

Ramses handed his pigskin valise to the undertaker and looked in annoyance at another young man, this one standing apart from the circle of mourners with an eager expression. He was wearing a hard-crown straw boater with a press card in the ribbon headband, holding a Speed Graphic camera in both hands.

"Dr. Val Jean, I'm Eddie Paradise Galphin from the
Tri-State Defender
. Reckon could I get a—"

"It's Val-
zhon
. I don't want to be photographed." Ramses took off his straw fedora as if to shield his face should the young man ignore his wishes. Hatless he showed a full head of relaxed, pomaded hair that he dyed black and wore styled like Ellington's.

"Well then, if I could talk to you for a few minutes about your—"

"This is a sorrowful day," young Wundall snapped at the
Defender
's man. "Show some respect for a bereaved father."

"Yes, respect his privacy," one of the elderly aunties said.

A few of the mourners accompanied Ramses and Wundall to the mortician's Cadillac as if to protect him from further indignities proposed by the presence of a reporter. Eddie Paradise Galphin remained on the station platform smoking a cigarette; when Wundall drove Ramses away from the depot, Galphin hurried to his own car, a vintage rumble-seat roadster, and followed them.

S
heriff's deputy Olen McMullen had been on duty at Little Grove Holiness Church since about nine-thirty that morning, keeping everyone who attended the Sunday service and later the morbidly curious away from the cemetery hollow where Mally Shaw's body had been discovered at dawn by Ike Thurmond. McMullen was tired, surly, and bored stupid while waiting on a relief dep. He had read the sports pages of the Sunday
Tennessean
three times. Much of the sports was devoted to the Summer Olympics that were about to get underway. Few people in Evening Shade cared anything about the Olympics; and where the hell was Finland anyway?

The two-car procession, one highly polished Cadillac and one dilapidated roadster driven by Eddie Paradise Galphin, newshound, arrived, and both cars parked on the Yella Dog side of the road opposite the church and not far from Mally Shaw's Dodge. Wundall the mortician remained by the Caddy while Ramses, carrying a brown paper sack, made his way along the gravel path to the cemetery gates. There was no wall around the cemetery, only a pair of wrought-iron gates with hinges rusted open.

Deputy McMullen wiped his brow again with a soggy handkerchief and sauntered over to intercept Mally's father a few feet from the gates.

"What can I do you for, uncle?"

Ramses paused, and his bearded chin came up in the manner of a thoroughbred horse confronted by a broken-down old plug.

"I am Dr. Valjean. My daughter, I have been given to understand, was found here this morning, slaughtered—according to a preliminary investigation—by wild dogs. I have the permission of acting sheriff Bobby Gambier to view the general area."

"Oh uh yeah—I heard you might be coming. But I should warn you it ain't a pretty—"

"I am a doctor of pathology. I now teach at Meharry Medical College after many years as chief of staff at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville. I have, you might say, seen almost every terrible thing, that can be visited upon a human being. Has anyone other than law-enforcement personnel come through here since Mally's body"—here he faltered, but only for an instant—"was removed?"

"No uh, sir," Olen McMullen said, the first time in his life he had ever sir'd a Negro. And looked around guiltily as if he was afraid he'd been overheard.

Ramses looked at the deputy's perspiring red face and smiled sympathetically.

"It's very hot, isn't it? Have you been here long?"

"Practically the whole friggin' day," McMullen said.

Ramses opened his paper sack. "Well then, it was fortunate that I stopped at the mercantile back up the road. Would you care for a Coke or perhaps Grapette?"

"Ohhh—sure, wouldn't mind at all. You said grape?"

"Yes." Ramses handed the bottle of soda to the deputy, reached into a coat pocket for a large staghorn knife which contained, in addition to two sharp blades, an assortment of gadgetry that included a bottle opener. He popped the tops on the bottles, and they drank together, McMullen sighing with enjoyment, the surly knit of his brows relaxing.

"Real nice of you, Doc."

"My pleasure." Ramses took out his gold pocket watch. The time was a few minutes before five p.m. That left him, he calculated, half an hour at best before he would need to seek isolation and refuge. He closed the watch. "Now, if I may—"

"Surely," McMullen looked up to the road. "Who's that with the camera?"

"A representative of the press. If you wouldn't mind asking him to keep his distance for now while I am—engaged in prayerful solitude, then I may agree to have my picture taken next to the church. I believe that should satisfy his mania for, ah, 'getting the story.'"

"Okey-dokey."

Ramses set his Coke bottle down as the deputy walked toward the road. He removed his suit jacket, folded and laid it on the front seat of the sheriff's car parked beside the gates. Then he walked the gentle downslope of the wide path into the burial ground. He could see just where the carnage had taken place while he was still a hundred feet away. A headstone with torn-up turf around it was splashed with blood that still attracted flies.

Ramses approached the site, where for several minutes he was motionless, moving only his head as he surveyed every inch of a gruesome scene. He heard a train whistle; soon a long freight rumbled by a hundred yards north of the cemetery. He felt the ground tremble beneath his shoes. When the train had passed, he noticed a boy on a bicycle riding along the platform of the abandoned Cole's Crossing depot. A white boy.

He returned his attention to the death scene, where he slowly began to walk around, sometimes dropping to one knee for a closer study. Sniffing deeply a few times. Carefully parting tufts of grass. His mind was fully in clinical mode as he repressed all emotion. He saw clots of blood, insects, pieces of a dress. There was a vase with spilled and wilted flowers not far from the blood-soaked headstone. It was still possible, to his trained eye, to tell where Mally's body had lain and in what position. Around the beaten-down grass and pods of dried mud there were paw prints and men's footprints. Five or six different men. There was a chewed sandal in grass and weeds ten feet from the vase and flowers.

Ramses kept his back to the gates and the deputy who was with the mortician and the reporter. He pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and began to pick up bits and pieces of things that interested him. He wrapped each separately in tissue paper he'd also purchased at the general store and placed everything in the brown paper sack.

Before leaving he picked up Mally's sandal, holding it by a torn strap. The leather was darkly dappled with blood. He was interested in what was on the sole. He carried the sandal out of the cemetery and met Deputy McMullen coming down from the road.

"I wonder why this wasn't removed along with my daughter's remains?"

"Prob'ly they just overlooked it this morning."

"If you think it would be all right, Deputy, I'd like to take it with me."

"Much as it was your daughter's, can't see no reason why not." McMullen looked at the folded-over paper sack in Ramses's other hand but didn't say anything else. He was curious, though, when Ramses took time to study tire tracks both on and off the pea-gravel path.

Ramses retrieved his jacket from the sheriff's car. "Thank you for your kindness, Deputy."

"Well, it were a terrible thing happened, and I feel right sorry about it. Those pack dogs been a problem 'round these parts since I was a kid. Killed a old woman over to Palermo, let's see, four-five years ago, believe it was. Just have to track 'em down and shoot 'em."

Ramses nodded, looking as if the heat and horror of what had befallen Mally had worn away his defenses. There was a trudge to his step as he went up to the road and beckoned Eddie Paradise Galphin over for a brief conversation. McMullen watching and thinking that here was some nigger all right; not like any other buck or uncle he had run across in Evening Shade or the military service. If there was a difference to most of them it was the difference between dirt and mud in McMullen's estimation; but Ramses had disturbed this complacent equation in the deputy's brain and he wasn't happy with the suspicion that forevermore he might have to deal with it.

E
very place of business in Evening Shade was shut tight on Sundays except for the Tropical Breeze ice-cream stand that was open summers only and Pee-Wee's Good Eats, both across the road from the brick factory where eighty-odd local people were employed making Hanes-brand underwear. Pee-Wee almost never closed except for Christmas day; he lived in two rooms in the back of his caf
é
and if you were hungry at two a.m. you could go around and rap on the back door and if he knew you and thought you might have some fresh gossip to reward him, Pee-Wee would get up and put the coffee on.

All Southern communities with more than one traffic light have a Pee-Wee or a Shorty, and most run true to type: Mickey Rooney—size, born standing up and talking back and, in the case of Evening Shade's Pee-Wee, minutely knowledgeable about all on this earth that is worth living for: fishing, hunting, politics, and sports in their seasons; the brag and mythos of male sexual prowess.

Around six in the evening. Alex was halfway through a cheeseburger soggy with mustard and ketchup when Bobby came in to the tinkling of the bell over the front door, yelled at Pee-Wee, who was wrapped in an apron that looked as if it had been through an auto-da-f
é
, old Pee-Wee wreathed in stinky fry-grease smoke behind the counter and yelling back at him. He had the face of a cranky fetus. Bobby slipped into the initial-scarred, high-backed booth opposite his brother, having another look around the cafe to check on who was there and not given to minding his own business. But PeeWee's clientele was nearly all families with small ones, a couple of whom were whiners or liked to crawl under the tables. Except for a smile or a wave of greeting, nobody paid further attention to Bobby.

Pee-Wee had Sara Sundeen waiting tables this Sunday and an elderly coachwhip Negro named, obscurely, True Willie Nebraska working alongside him, handing the burgers and Cokes out the Jim Crow window. The Negroes ate their meals at picnic tables in a restful grove of persimmon and chestnut trees between Pee-Wee's establishment and the Tropical.

"What you fixin' to have, Bobby?" Sara asked him. She was fifty, give or take, still maintaining a rawboned beauty in spite of the puckered skin under-eyes like misplaced vaccination scars. She had carried on with his daddy once upon a time, among other things Bobby knew about her.

"Coffee black; let's see, uh, toasted cheese, whole wheat. I still got to eat dinner home later on."

"Catch up to them wild dogs yet?"

"No, but we're out there looking."

Alex paused with a mouthful of burger and raised his eyes to his brother's face.

"Lord, that does give me the shudders! Poor thing. She was a pretty one. Educated too."

Bobby glanced at Alex's face, the wad in his jaw he wasn't swallowing, and wondered.

"Heard she was looking after Priest Howard in his last days. Reckon what she was doing in that cemetery come crack of dawn?"

"No telling. Might just have been something she liked to do. Quiet that early, nobody else around to bother."