Both Sides of Bare Tree Mountain (eBook)

Chapter One

The Witness

*

The girl was calming down. She had been a nervous wreck since well before she flagged down the old man in the gray Oldsmobile.

“I didn’t think she could take another step,” she told the two men sitting on the other side of the table. Her eyes moved from one detective to the other.

“She always walks funny but you should have seen her today. Her knees barely bent, her arms seldom swung, and her head hardly moved. She looked straight ahead and didn’t blink. Well, to tell the truth, she did blink one time today but that was later.”

She was puckering her lips each time she exhaled, trying to end or at least control her anxiety. Now, since she started talking and was getting into the flow of her story, she was beginning to relax. Still, her left foot was drumming out a slow rhythm on the bare wooden floor. The rubber sole of her shoe made a muffled tap each time it struck the planks. It sounded like a heartbeat. She looked down at her once white canvas shoe and pressed her hand down on her knee. The tapping stopped. She turned her eyes up from her shoe to look at the fat detective who was supposed to be writing everything down.

“Are you writing everything down?” she asked. “It looks to me like you’re wearing that pencil out from the wrong end. I’ve never seen anybody erase and start over so much.”

Although the nervousness caused by the day’s earlier events was ebbing, being in the police station made her anxious, and the emotion was manifesting itself as belligerence.

A cigarette hung on the fat man’s lower lip. When he gave an affirmative nod to indicate that he was, indeed, writing everything down, ashes fell onto the writing tablet. He took the cigarette from his mouth and ground it into an amber ashtray shaped like an oak leaf, then blew the ashes from the tablet. They fluttered toward the other detective who scowled but said nothing. The girl noticed how the sweat beads moved on top of the fat policeman’s bald head when he shook it up and down. A small dollop of perspiration fell onto his writing tablet. He blotted it with his thumb, looked up at a clock on the wall and lit another cigarette.

The girl combed her cropped hair from her forehead with her fingers. She had lost the blue plastic clip that pinned her bangs back. She wondered when it had come loose.

“Let’s get on with the story,” Sgt. Lord, the other policeman, instructed.

When Lord first told her his name, right after she sat down at the table, her lips tightened in an effort not to grin. He removed a leather wallet from the inside pocket of his too big sports coat and showed her a badge and an identification card. He said, “I am Sergeant Harold D. Lord.”

From her point of view he didn’t say it but whined it, as if he was annoyed to be validating himself to a little girl. She said, “Well, I never knew that was your first name. No sir-ee-bob, I never would have guessed it.”

Lord straightened himself a bit, sitting taller in his chair as he pulled his slumped shoulders back and raised his chin.

“You’ve heard of me,” he stated.

“Well,” she said, “I reckon so. I guess everybody has heard of the Lord but I never heard anybody say his first name was Harold.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes toward the top of the room. The fat cop chuckled softly. Sgt. Lord glared at him until he composed himself and looked down at his writing tablet with the pencil pointed in readiness.

Lord exhaled and said, “I’ve heard that one a million times. It wasn’t funny the first time I heard it and it’s still not funny. Forget the jokes and get on with the story.”

She said, “Listen here, you two are the ones who said “now-tell-us-everything-little-lady,” and that is exactly what I’m doing, telling you everything. I hate to get rushed up. It takes a while to tell everything, and I can’t tell everything if I try to tell it in a hurry.”

She managed to maintain an annoyed expression and said, “Give me one of those cigarettes, and then I’ll get on with the story.”

The two investigators looked at each other.

“You’re too young to smoke,” Sgt. Lord said. “You can’t be over thirteen.”

“I’m thirteen and a half, and anyhow, I’ve inhaled more of his old used smoke,” she thrust her chin toward the fat policeman, “than I will ever get out of smoking one of those king-sized Chesterfields myself.”

She leaned her head back and looked up. A thin fog of blue smoke undulated near the high ceiling, slowly spiraling above the rotating fan. There was a haze around the light bulb. She thought the room needed to be brighter. She dropped her eyes toward the row of open windows to her right and looked down the long, narrow room. A slight breeze seeped between the slats of the Venetian blinds, moving them with an almost unperceivable motion. The light outside was fading into late afternoon.

“It seems kind of dark in here,” she said absentmindedly, turning her eyes back toward the bulb. “Is that only a forty watt?”

“A forty what?” Lord asked.

“Not a forty what, a forty watt. What’s wrong with you?” she snapped.

No one spoke for a few seconds. Sgt. Lord thought the room was getting hot. He removed a handkerchief from his back pocket, folded it over and used it to pat his forehead. The other detective was still looking down at the writing tablet, his pencil still aimed at the paper.

“Well, give me one of them smokes,” she demanded again. “I usually smoke about fifty cigarettes a day anyhow.” She lied, both about her age and about smoking cigarettes, but she thought the policemen hadn’t caught on. She was barely eleven and all she had ever smoked was her Uncle Hiram’s pipe when he ran off into the woods for a couple of days and left it behind. She liked the aroma of the cherry flavored tobacco he used. He wouldn’t let her touch the pipe when he was present.

“It’s a Meerschaum,” he would say to her. “You’ll leave your fingerprints on it.”

The fat policeman said, “Just make do with what smoke is in the air and go on with the story.” He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and snuffed it into the amber ashtray. The butt continued to produce a filament of smoke. The girl cleared her throat.

“Now start at the beginning, please,” said Sgt. Lord with another dab of the handkerchief to his forehead.

She thought for a second, inhaled between her teeth, pushed her hair back again and went on.

“You see,” she said as she looked straight across the table at the overweight investigator to make sure he was listening, “last week Uncle Hiram, he’s Grandma Avens’ boy, well, he ain’t actually a boy, he must be over thirty years old. He’s my momma’s twin brother. My momma got killed in a bus wreck when I was a baby. I was in it with her. The wreck, I mean. Well, I was in the bus, too, I reckon. All I got was a broken finger,” she held up the pinky on her right hand, “and a knot on my head. It’s still there a little bit. Do you two want to touch it?”

She put her hand on the crown of her head and paused to see if they did. They didn’t. She shrugged and went on.

“Anyhow, Grandma and Grandpa Avens raised me until Grandpa died, then Grandma raised me by herself, with a little help from Uncle Hiram, I reckon. Uncle Hiram lives with us and, well, people say he’s crazy. Every now and then he stands up on the hood of an old green car that’s rusting down out by the hardtop road and he crows like a rooster. It’s not unusual for him to disappear into the woods for a few days but he always comes back. Oh, and he likes to sit in trees. People say he’s peculiar, but if he is, I don’t mind. He’s always kind to me. I’ve learned a lot from him, to tell the truth.”

The fat cop moved his head from side to side trying to work a crick out of his neck. He, like Sgt. Lord, thought the room was getting hotter.

“Please, miss, only tell us the facts,” he said to her.

“These are the facts, Tubby,” she snapped. He looked at her, surprised at being called Tubby. She stared back at him and said, “If the shoe fits...”

For a moment she felt a pang of guilt because she sensed she hurt his feelings, but the guilt quickly passed.

“His name is Otto Purkey,” Lord corrected. “Detective Otto Purkey.”

“Whatever,” she said dismissively and refocused on her story. “Well, last week Uncle Hiram was out by the blacktop road with his knees bent down in a duck walk and his hands stuck under his armpits with his neck bobbing in and out. He hid in the weeds and then ran out at cars when they came around the curve. He’s done it several times before. He thinks it’s funny.”

Both police officers glowered at her. “Honest,” she told them, “I saw him do it. Doc Collins said he was going to get himself killed because chickens don’t usually make it across the road in that particular curve. Doc Collins persuaded Uncle Hiram to let him take him home. After he handed him over to Grandma, the doctor went to town to talk to Judge Pepper. The judge called the State Hospital at Hickory Hill and they sent some people to the farm. To make a long story short, they caught Uncle Hiram and took him away. He didn’t put up much of a fight at all. He bit one of them, but he didn’t bite him hard. It is hardly worth mentioning. Actually, I...