And all the while, instead of becoming a model of peace, prosperity, and racial harmony, parts of Blackwell County, like much of the rest of the country, were becoming a battle zone for the gangs, drug dealers, and the underclass that seems to be growing daily.
As I angle south off 1-40 before reaching Forrest City, I wonder why it took so long for me to realize I was no longer a soldier in a war that couldn’t be won, not in my lifetime anyway. I didn’t really need to solve the world’s problems.
It has been more than I can do to raise Sarah and keep myself out of trouble. Sarah. The thought of her makes me smile. Such a wonderful kid but a moralist as only the young can be. At various times in the past three years she’s been a fundamentalist Christian, a dancer on the Razorbacks porn porn squad, a feminist. Now she’s a caregiver to AIDS victims.
Always searching. I hope I haven’t made her too insecure ever to be content with herself. Her mother’s death from breast cancer when she was in junior high didn’t help. How much did my father’s schizophrenia and subsequent suicide when I was thirteen affect me? It is something I will always wonder about. Sarah has coped much better than I did.
I stop at a convenience store in Moro to use the bathroom. Middle age.
If this is a precursor to what’s ahead, I can’t get too excited about it. Is it my imagination or do I really have to piss fifteen times a day? How do guys who work in factories cope with one fifteen-minute break in the morning? As I read the copy on the white condom boxes above the urinal, I realize I would need a catheter and a bottle the size of a water cooler strapped to my leg to hold a job in a plant.
On the road again with a cup of coffee, I can tell I am back home in the Delta by the increasing number of beat-up old cars with blacks behind the wheel, many of them as ancient looking as their cars.
Despite having been away, I can’t escape the feeling that I know this area, and I know its people, better than I’ll ever know anyplace else.
There is something vaguely comforting about the past even if it was difficult. I think of the way I acted at thirteen after my father hanged himself on the state hospital grounds in Benton.
As far as shitty adolescent behavior goes, I can’t quite say I wrote the book. Walking out of class, talking back to teachers, sneaking beer out of neighbors’ refrigerators, was small potatoes compared to the problems kids have today, but it was enough to make my mother think that she wasn’t going to be able to handle me. She couldn’t afford to send me to Subiaco, but, as Marty, my sister, has pointed out, at the time she couldn’t afford not to. Fortunately, for me, society didn’t have psychiatric institutions for kids who mainly needed a good kick in the butt every day.
At Subiaco I cried like the baby I was that first semester, but Mother had the sense not to let me come home. I resented it at the time, but she was right. Was she perhaps right also to discourage Rosa and me from returning to Bear Creek? Why did I want to go back, anyway?
Rosa’s presence would have been a constant reminder to the town that perhaps the rumors about my paternal grandfather’s out-of-wedlock child were true, something that my mother had consistently denied.
“It’s in the Page blood,” they would have said.
“They’re all nigger lovers.”
Coming into the outskirts of Bear Creek on 79 I continue east toward Memphis, and I arrive at the state prison and county jail facility fifteen minutes later. I sign in at the reception desk and then have to get back in my car and drive around to a separate building to see my client, a hassle I’d like to avoid in the future.
Short, round, and balding in his bright orange jumpsuit, Bledsoe does not look like a killer. We sit across from each other in a visitation room in green plastic chairs separated from each other by a clear glass window and steel mesh, and I scribble notes while he talks.
“I liked ole Willie,” he says mildly.
“I felt pretty bad when they told me someone cut him up. He was a hell of a good man. Hardly anybody would be workin’ in Bear Creek at all if it wudn’t for people like him.”
“When did they first start acting like you were a suspect?” I ask, noting how easygoing Class appears. I was afraid he was going to be some hulking monster who looked at home with a butcher knife. Instead, his hands are smaller than mine, and his receding hairline and a squint give him a mild, innocent expression that a jury can’t help but notice.
“The best I figure now, the very next morning,” Class drawls, wiping his nose with his sleeve.
“The plant’s got these two meat inspectors, and one of them said he saw my knife wasn’t put up exactly right, and they said there was some blood on it. I heard it turned out ‘0’ positive-same as ole Willie’s.
Of course, I didn’t know all this was going on. They began questioning everybody on the kill floor that day and up front, too. Even though I’d been home that afternoon by myself, I never figured I had to worry.”
“How’d they say Willie was killed?” I ask, realizing how much I have forgotten to ask his wife.
“Was there a struggle?”
Class shakes his head.
“Naw, they said he didn’t even put up a fight. That’s why they knew right away it was somebody who worked in the plant.
Whoever done it jus’ walked right up behind him at his desk and cut his throat and then stepped back and watched him die. It wouldn’t take long
if you get that artery.” Class draws an imaginary line across his throat.
I feel a chill, and it isn’t just from the cold.
What a horrible moment it must have been for that old man when he realized what was happening to him.
“So you were the only suspect?” I ask, thinking how tempting it would be to try to frame someone like him.
Class shrugs.
“They acted like we was all suspects for a while till that blood got checked. Then the sheriff wanted me to take a lie detector test, and I wouldn’t. Hell, I don’t trust that shit. Then they fired me, but nothing happened after that until yesterday when all hell broke loose.”
Somehow he is able to grin, though weakly, at the spectacle of himself being taken into custody.
“Your wife said she heard that the DNA analysis,” I say, realizing he may not know, “showed conclusively that the blood on your knife was Willie’s.”
“I don’t know about that,” Class demurs, scratching a sore on his ring finger.
“Anybody could have got hold of my knife. We just kept ‘em laid out in the back. Ever’body had his own spot.”
I try to visualize the floor of a meat packing plant and conjure up a scene of bloody, controlled carnage. I will have to get the judge to allow me a tour of the plant. The inside of my mouth begins to moisten at just the thought. This will be fun: I can’t even see a dead weasel on the road without becoming a little queasy.
“How do they tell them apart?”
“Most scratch a little mark on the handle,” Class explains.
“I got my initials on mine.”
It occurs to me that Class misses his work.
“What have you been doing since you got fired?”
I ask, wondering how I’d handle months of idleness.
I’d probably turn into an alcoholic after the first month.
“I’ve been helpin’ out at my uncle’s barbecue place in town for a while,” Class responds.
“It’s actually owned by Paul Taylor. I didn’t even know that.”
For the first time since I’ve been talking to him, I pick up a false note here. I haven’t asked about his association with the Taylors.
“What are you talking about?” I ask, watching his face carefully.
If he is conning me, I’d like to find out earlier than later.
“They’re sayin’ he hired me,” Class says.
“I hardly even know him.”
I question him at length about Paul, and he admits that before he started at the plant he was a delivery man for an appliance store in town that Paul owned. Paul rarely came in the store, but when he did, he would make a point to speak to the help.