Sunset and Sawdust

  “He ain’t in any kind of trouble, is he?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  Zendo’s wife told her, with what Sunset thought was reluctance, that Zendo was still in the field.

  On her way out to the truck she passed the hog and the dog again, but this time neither took note of her.

  They drove to where the wife had indicated, got out of the truck and started walking toward where they could see Zendo having his dinner under a tree.

  Two sleek, sweat-shiny mules stood nearby, still in plow harness, but the plow was no longer attached. The plow was leaning against the tree with Zendo. The mules had been hobbled and were mouthing grain from two flat pans.

  The field Zendo had plowed, running the middles, cutting up weeds, was dark as sin, the rows straight enough to have been laid out with a ruler. The dark soil exploded with all manner of vegetables. Corn growing tall and green. Tied tomato vines twisted around wooden stakes, tomatoes dangled from them like little evening suns.

  Zendo was biting into a biscuit when he saw a redheaded woman, a teenage girl, and two men walking toward him.

  The woman looked roughed up, and his first thought was to run, just in case he was going to be blamed. Then he noted she was wearing a badge on her shirt. He considered this, but couldn’t get a fix on it.

  By this time, they were standing beneath the oak, looking down at him. He put the biscuit in his lunch bucket and stood up. It wasn’t a long trip. He had a large head, broad shoulders, and a short body. If he mounted a Shetland pony, the pony would have to be cut off at the knees and placed in a ditch for Zendo’s feet to touch the ground.

  “Howdy, this hot day,” he said, hanging his head, starting to shuffle his feet. “How is you folks? It sure is one of God’s good days, now ain’t it, even if it is hot.”

  “It’s me,” Clyde said. “You can cut the ‘I sure is dumb’ routine.”

  “Is that you, Mr. Clyde? I ain’t seen you in a coon’s age, if you’ll pardon the joke. We got to do us some more fishing.”

  “I agree,” Clyde said, stuck out his hand, and they shook. Hillbilly did the same, hesitantly. Zendo didn’t offer to shake hands with either Sunset or Karen.

  “Crops look great, Zendo,” Clyde said.

  “Bottomland,” Zendo said. “And I treat it good. I run the creek water in it sometimes, does it with lots of cured manure and compost.”

  “Sure looks good,” Clyde said. “Zendo, this is Sunset Jones. She’s the constable in these parts now.”

  “Say she ain’t,” Zendo said.

  “No. She is.”

  “Shut me up. Really? You the constable, miss?”

  “I am.”

  “You’re yanking on me.”

  “I tell you I’m not,” Sunset said.

  “I thought Mister Pete was the constable.”

  “He’s dead,” Sunset said.

  “Oh, well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Zendo said.

  “He was my husband.”

  “Well, now, I’m sure sorry. How did he die, you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I shot him.”

  “Say you did?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Dead.”

  “Yes.”

  Karen started back to the pickup.

  “We’ll be here just a little while,” Sunset said to Karen’s back.

  Karen didn’t answer, just kept walking.

  “She’s still sensitive about her father’s death.”

  “I hear that,” Zendo said. “Yes, ma’am. I understand. Mr. Pete was a good man.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Sunset said. “He was a sonofabitch, and I’m glad I shot him.”

  “Say he was a sonofabitch?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I bet you agree with me.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Zendo said, “I ain’t gonna argue with you none.”

  “We’re here about dealings Pete had with you.”

  “Me and him didn’t have no dealings.”

  “A body in a pottery jar,” Sunset said.

  “Oh, yeah. Was that. Said he wouldn’t gonna make no big deal out of it.”

  “I read it in his files. Tell me about it. Tell me where the baby ended up, or if you have any idea whose it was.”

  Zendo told them pretty much what Sunset had read in the files. He found the body plowing, where someone had buried it in a large pottery jar, probably the night before. It was buried deep, but he was plowing deep, and the top of his middle buster broke the rim of the jar.

  “I thought it might be one of them Injun pots. I’ve found a bunch of em. But it weren’t. I looked in that pot and seen there was a tow sack stuffed in there. When I pulled that off the top, I seen a little baby about the size of a newborn kitten.”

  “Black or white?”

  “Couldn’t tell. It was all dirty, and there was some kind of stuff in there.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Something sticky. It was on the edge of the pot and dirt had stuck to it. It was all over the baby. It was like someone had dipped the baby in it. I thought it was molasses.”

  “Was it molasses?” Sunset asked.

  “I thought it was, but it had a smell to it, and I figure it was oil mixed in with the dirt.”

  “Car oil?”

  “Maybe. I didn’t know what to do with it. I feared it might be a white baby and white folks would think I killed it cause it was on my land, so I hid it in the woods.”

  “You buried it?” Sunset asked.

  Zendo shook his head. “I ain’t proud to say I didn’t, but I didn’t. Mr. Pete found the pot, knew the dirt on it was mine. Ain’t no one around here got dirt this good. Not the way I treat it.

  “Thought he was gonna think I done it for sure. But he didn’t. Wasn’t hard on me at all. Didn’t even ask me if I knowed anything about it, just took and buried that poor thing over in the colored graveyard. Or said that’s what he was gonna do.”

  “You know Pete found it himself?” Sunset asked.

  “He just come to me about it. I reckoned he did. Suppose someone else could have found it, told him, and he figured out it come from my place.”

  “Where is the graveyard?” Sunset asked.

  “Clyde here knows,” Zendo said.

  Clyde shook his head. “Not anymore. I used to. But I ain’t been out in that neck of the woods in years. Since you and me hunted there last, and that’s been—good grief, we was kids.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Zendo said. “You and me was the same tall then. Now you just like a tree, and me, I’m like a stump.”

  Zendo picked up a stick and drew a map in the dirt, made an X where the graveyard was, said, “Right there. Got to walk some to get to it. Can’t go all the way there by car.”

  “Thanks,” Sunset said. “You can finish your dinner.”

  Zendo said, “Guess Mr. Pete done hit the wrong person, didn’t he?”

  “On that day, yes,” Sunset said.

  They had to leave the truck on a clay road by a sweet gum and walk down through the trees to get to the cemetery. The air was heavy beneath the trees, and though the shade took away the direct heat of the sun, it was humid and the mosquitoes were thicker than tacks in a tar-paper shack.

  Karen said, “Why would anyone put a graveyard down in the woods like this? Ain’t they usually alongside the road?”

  “Some white folks think it’s a real laugh to mess with colored grave-yards,” Clyde said. “This way it ain’t so easy to bother.”

  “Kind of hard to carry the bodies to the hole, ain’t it?” Hillbilly said.

  “Reckon it is,” Clyde said, swatting a mosquito.

  “Bugs are eating me up,” Karen said.

  “You can go back and wait in the truck if you want,” Sunset said.

  But Karen didn’t go back. Finally the woods thinned and there was a trail.

  “Didn’t Zendo say turn left?” Sunset said.

  “Way I remember it,” Hillbilly said.


  “Yeah,” Clyde said. “That’s how you go. It’s coming back to me.”

  They walked along for a distance, and soon there was a large clearing that looked to have been worked with machetes, and just beyond that was a place of erected stones. There were oak trees in the cemetery with moss and vines growing up the sides, dripping off their limbs. There was one dogwood in the cemetery and some honeysuckle, and the aroma of the honeysuckle was strong and bees were buzzing the flowers on the tree.

  Some of the graves ran right up to the trees, and you could see where roots had lifted the stones and made them sag. But it was a well-cared-for place and there were fresh flowers on many of the graves and voodoo beads and pieces of bright-colored glass on some of the others. There were even a few fruit jars with liquid in them.

  “What’s in them fruit jars?” Hillbilly asked.

  “Home liquor sometimes,” Clyde said. “They bring it out for the dead.”

  “That’s silly,” Hillbilly said, “and a waste of liquor.”

  Karen laughed at that.

  Hillbilly grinned at Karen. “Me and Karen could drink that instead of it going to waste, couldn’t we, kid?”

  Karen laughed again.

  Sunset said, “Karen don’t drink.”

  “Course not,” Hillbilly said. “Just making a joke.”

  Finally Sunset found a grave with a wooden cross over it. The cross was made of cheap lumber and two nails. Next to it were fragments of busted pottery.Written on the cross was: BABY.

  “Pete did this,” Sunset said. “I recognize the way he carved the B’s into that cross. It’s like his writing, way he makes his B’s. He must have busted up the pot to get the baby out, or maybe it got busted later on by someone else.”

  “Daddy wasn’t so bad,” Karen said. “See how he done with the baby and all.”

  Hillbilly swatted a mosquito. “Long walk down here for nothing, you ask me.”

  “We could give the baby a name,” Clyde said. “We could write it on the cross. We could call it something like Snooks.”

  “No, we couldn’t,” Sunset said. “And besides. We don’t know if it was male or female.”

  “I still like Snooks,” Clyde said. “It works either way. Girl or boy. You like Snooks, Hillbilly?”

  “No,” Hillbilly said.

  “Hell, you got a name like Hillbilly,” Clyde said. “What’s wrong with Snooks?”

  “Hillbilly’s a nickname. And don’t ask my real one, cause I don’t tell it. What did we learn here, Sunset? What was this trip all about?”

  “Don’t rightly know,” Sunset said. “Let’s go back.”

  10

  That night, before Sunset and Karen went to bed, it came a rain not too unlike the one that pissed on Noah’s ark, but it didn’t last long. Just wetted up the place, churned the creeks, made them rise, then moved on. The tent had been set up on top of the flooring of the old house, so they didn’t get wet, but they could feel it against the floorboards, begging to come in.

  The rain cooled off things, and when she and Karen lay down that night to sleep, it was comfortable and there were no mosquitoes.

  Sunset lay in bed listening to the rain move south with a vengeance, thinking about the baby in the jar coated in oil, about how Pete had gone to the trouble to bury it and carve the word BABY on the cross.

  It was a kind gesture.

  And not like him at all. Especially if he thought the baby might be colored.

  It was a side of Pete she hadn’t known existed, and it was a side of him she wished she had known. It was also a side of him that confused her and of which she was suspicious.

  Later on she heard the tent flap being thrown back. She sat up in bed and saw a man’s shape standing there. He pushed the flap back farther and moonlight spilled in over him. It was Pete. Grave dirt was dropping off of his body and he looked mad enough to pee vinegar.

  He pointed his finger at Sunset and opened his mouth to speak. Dirt fell out. Then he screamed.

  Sunset sat up in bed.

  She looked at the tent flap.

  It was closed and tied. Outside she could hear crickets and frogs. The rain had passed. She had fallen asleep thinking she was awake.

  Suddenly, once again, there was a scream.

  It wasn’t Pete. It was a panther, roaming the bottomland. They could scream like a woman. The sound of the panther had awakened her, not a dead Pete.

  She looked over at Karen.

  Still asleep. She gently pulled the covers up to Karen’s neck.

  “I love you,” she said softly.

  Lying down, she dozed uneasily, dreamed again. But she knew it was a dream this time, and it wasn’t so bad. It was a dream about her putting the pistol to Pete’s head, pulling the trigger, and in her dream the sound of the gun was sharp and sweet and it cut through her thoughts like a bright light and the light opened a gap somewhere down deep in the dark insides of her, and out of that gap came all the answers to questions long asked, and in that moment, that fine and wonderful moment, she knew things.

  She came awake.

  “Damn,” she said. Thought: Almost had the answers. They were about to be revealed, all the goddamn perplexities of the universe, and I had to wake up.

  The tent flap moved.

  She reached over and pulled the gun from the holster where it lay on the floor and pointed it.

  It was the black-and-white dog. It had stuck its head under the tent flap. It was soaking wet.

  “Easy, boy,” she said, but the dog bolted at the sound of her voice.

  She put the gun away, lay there waiting to see if the dog would return, but it didn’t.

  Next morning, before daybreak, to the sound of birds singing loud in the trees and somewhere an agitated squirrel fussing, Karen got up along with Sunset. Karen started a fire in the woodstove and cooked a breakfast of eggs and toasted some bread on top of the burner for the both of them.

  Sunset eyed all this suspiciously. It was the first time in days Karen had shown interest in doing anything.

  Karen walked buckets of water from the water pump and heated them in a larger bucket on the stove and poured the hot water into a number ten washtub. By the time she had enough buckets to fill the tub, much of the water had cooled, but it was still warm enough for a bath with minted lye soap and special attention to her hair.

  When Karen finished, Sunset went through the same ritual, washing her hair and combing it out. As Sunset dressed in her skirt and shirt, she saw that Karen was already dressed and had put her hair up in a kind of bun. She had on one of the few good dresses she owned, one her grandmother gave her before they had moved into the tent, and she had on her only good pair of shoes.

  Sunset noted that Karen had even applied a bit of lipstick, not something she normally bothered with. She was also wearing perfume, and she had put on too much.

  While Sunset was pulling on her boots and lacing them, Karen said, “Those boots aren’t very feminine. They look like something someone ought to wear at the sawmill or to shovel horse mess.”

  “I’m a constable right now, not a New York fashion model.”

  “You ought to put your hair up,” Karen said.

  “I see you have. How come you’re putting on the dog?”

  “No reason. Just felt like it.”

  Sunset went to the dressing table they had rigged, held up a hand mirror. She thought: Maybe I could put my hair up.

  Her face was no longer puffy and the bruises were starting to fade. She was beginning to look like herself, with a touch of raccoon styling.

  About nine o’clock, Clyde’s truck pulled up. Karen heard it, smoothed her dress, opened the tent flap.

  Through the opening, Sunset could see Clyde climbing out of the truck, and on the other side, Hillbilly. She stood up, strapped on the holster and gun, stood in the opening.

  A black car with white doors and a gold-and-black police insignia pulled up behind Clyde’s truck. A man wearing a big white hat and kh
aki clothes, a gun and badge, got out of the car and walked over to Clyde and shook his hand, then Hillbilly’s. He looked agitated. He spoke to Clyde.

  Clyde said something, pointed toward the tent.

  The man with the badge did a double take.

  Clyde said something else. The man took off his hat, and with Clyde and Hillbilly trailing, he hustled over to the tent as Sunset stepped outside, Karen following.

  “Miss,” the man said, “I’m the deputy over at Holiday. Name’s Morgan. I was sent here to get the constable for help. We heard Pete got killed by his wife, but I didn’t know it was a woman took his place. I can take these here men with me—”

  “I’m the constable. And I’m the wife . . . or was.”

  The deputy raised his eyebrows. “I’ll be damned.”

  “Why do you need us?”

  “Nigger’s gone on a rampage. Killed the sheriff.”

  “Oh,” Sunset said.

  “Knowing that,” Morgan said, “maybe you ought to stay here.”

  “What’s the situation?” Sunset said. She had heard Pete say just those words.

  “Well, I come over here cause me and Rooster are the only deputies, and this nigger, well, he done blowed the sheriff’s head off and holed himself up in the picture show and won’t come out.”

  “The picture show,” Clyde said. “He didn’t ruin it or nothing, did he?”

  “I think he broke some of them giveaway dishes,” Morgan said. “Some of the townsfolk wanted a piece of him, and the grocer brought out a gun and tried to go in there, and that nigger cut him off at the knee. I figure they’ll be pulling that grocer around on a wheeled board now. Thing is, it’s a nigger done it, and the town wants to lynch him. Sheriff didn’t go in for that sort of thing, though I ain’t really against a lynching when it’s deserved. They’re gonna want to rush the picture show, get that nigger and string him up and set him on fire, or burn down the picture show with him in it. Frankly, it’s Rooster who’s against it. He’s got the nigger pinned in the show, and he’s got them townsfolk pushing in on him, wanting him to get out of the way. He’s between a rock and a hard place. I didn’t know nothing else to do but to go to the nearest law for help. But I didn’t count on no woman, and I ain’t sure we ought not just let them have him.”

  “We’ll follow in the truck,” Sunset said. “Karen, you stay here. Clyde. Hillbilly. You got guns?”