The Dead Hand of Sweeney County Read online

  I thanked him for his time and for straightening me out regarding Isaac Cooper. I got back in the Mighty Ford and rolled down the road, thinking about the difference between local legend and history and how stories grow. Take, for instance, the summer the Dover kids decided to freak us out by convincing us our house was haunted.

  I was seven or so, living in Columbus with my three sisters, my mom, and my dad when he wasn't in Vietnam or on temporary assignment somewhere. The Dovers lived across the street and down a house, and one summer the older Dover girls started telling us that they had known Mr. Clegg, the builder and previous owner of our house, and that he had died mysteriously. Since then his ghost had been seen walking the front yard of the house before my dad bought it. Two of my sisters went for it, but I and another sister were skeptical. The next day, the story improved. Mr. Clegg had committed suicide.

  The tale was still only mildly interesting to me, and still not having the intended effect, so a couple of days later, it got even better. One of the older Dover sisters told me straight-faced that Mr. Clegg got drunk and really sad one night because his wife was seeing another man, and he came out and sat down by the mailbox with his shotgun. In front of the whole street, he then blew out his brains, and it was all true because she had seen it with her own eyes, just as since then she'd seen his ghost on full moon nights.

  In an attempt to scare me, the Dovers' daughters had cooked up a gruesome public suicide in the space of a few days, and if I'd believed it and told everyone that my childhood home was haunted, voila! Lie would have turned to legend, and my telling of that personalized ghost story might have helped convince someone else that ghosts are real and worse, that Mrs. Clegg was a whore.

  Much the same thing had happened in this case, but with better elements: a bloody ax and a slave off the chain. Not technically a slave, but a Jim Crow black man, which, in legal terms, was pretty much the same thing, minus the guaranteed meals and employment. A black man attacking a white man has always merited special punishment down here, second only to the immediate special punishment traditionally meted out in cases of suspected assault by black men on white women. If Isaac really was caught alone with a young white girl, he could well have expected the traditional immediate special punishment, which is probably why he threw an ax and ran for his life. Seventy years later, when white kids wanted to scare other white kids, there was still nothing more terrifying than an ax-wielding Negro who had forgotten his place. It occurred to me that in all probability, no black person had ever seen Crazy Isaac.

  It rained, it stopped; it rained and stopped all day as I performed my routine: drive to a location and wait for a break, jump out and do a sky plot, stake the point, and sketch the location in the little orange field book. Rinse and repeat all day long, from south to north, up the west side of the map. At two o'clock I had seven straight hours with no lunch and a three-hour drive ahead, so I called it a day. Rolling into Reynoldston, I stopped at a light and scanned the airwaves for a local NPR station. I found it, turned up Fresh Air, and looked up just in time to see Eleanor pass in a dark green Volvo.

  My first impulse was to follow her. I could ask her about the Conleys and Thorntons, a damned legit reason to talk to her again, if ever there was one, but she might think it weird to be chased down on the street. I sighed heavily. Crazy as it was, I really wanted to follow her. Suddenly, I knew what I needed to do: my laundry, which was stinking up the cab in a bag on the floor. I turned the truck southward, toward the interstate and home.

  3. Home, the Landlady, and How I Met the Sex Fairy

  Little Five Points is centered on an irregular hilltop east of downtown Atlanta. It is Atlanta's original Bohemian neighborhood, favored by Reds in the Thirties and rescued by liberals with an eye for intown real estate in the Seventies. In the late Twenties, an insurance man bought a house there in which to raise his family. It was a spacious, two-story, Edwardian design with a wide porch wrapping around the north and east sides of the house and a carriage house in the back. He lost one son in Korea, though, and another in Vietnam, so when he died in 1967, his only remaining children were two daughters, thirty year-old unmarried Katherine, and thirty-five year-old Veronica, a jazz-loving, recently divorced painter and English professor at Agnes Scott College with two children. Veronica's children grew up and moved away, so far away they stopped coming over for Thanksgiving and started sending airplane tickets instead. They say old maids live forever, but Katherine died in 1989 of a sudden heart attack. Veronica's kids immediately started talking about finding her someplace smaller and selling granddad's house, and I can only imagine their faces when Veronica told them all to piss off and started advertising for a tenant to perform maintenance on the house in exchange for rent.

  That's how Veronica and I met. I was twenty seven, still rebounding from being dumped in a way that included dispossession, and my friend Ray, I could tell, was getting tired of seeing me on his couch every morning. Temporarily cash-strapped, as I have found myself from time to time, the idea of exchanging work for rent sounded downright affordable. I wish I could recall anything particularly memorable about that first meeting, but all I really remember is being asked if I could change a water heater, hang sheet rock, fix a roof, those sorts of things. I wasn't even sure she liked me until she called the next day and asked when I could start. All the things I hadn't yet moved from Dina's-- my vinyl and such-- I moved to Veronica's house in 1990, and that's where my LPs and I have been since.

  I couldn't live in the house, though. It's nothing against dear, dear Veronica, but as soon as she took me upstairs to show me where I'd be sleeping, I started doubting my decision. All bedrooms are upstairs, on the same floor. All doorways are along the same not-too-large hall: farthest to the left is Veronica's office, then Veronica's bedroom, the bathroom, then Katherine's bedroom, which I was relieved to hear I would not be occupying, and, across the hall, the guest room, which I would. Distance from my bedroom door to the landlady's: maybe fifteen feet. With any luck, I'd be bringing home women, and with just a little more luck-- okay, under ideal circumstances-- loud sounds might emanate from my room. It has happened more than once, and in my twenties it was a somewhat regular occurrence. Perhaps, I remember thinking, I won't be here that long. I put down my bags, and she showed me the rest of the house and grounds. We stepped out of the kitchen door into the driveway. Turning to the right, I saw where I wanted to sleep.

  Behind the house was a carriage house with an upper floor for a coachman's quarters that were never used as such. I somehow managed to talk Veronica into letting me make it my sleeping quarters. She resisted at first, largely because the place was uninhabitable.

  “No,” she said, peering through one of the windows. “It's full of junk. The last car parked here was Dad's Packard.”

  I peered through the window next to her. Along the back wall I saw two doors.

  “What's behind those doors?” I asked.

  “On the left is a bathroom, as I recall. Just a toilet and a sink. On the right is a supply closet.”

  “There's water?”

  “Probably not in ages, young man.”

  “What's upstairs?”

  “More junk.”

  The wrought-iron stairs at the right looked sturdy enough, and I climbed them to the top. The door upstairs had a three-pane window, but it was frosted over with dust, and I struggled to make out what was inside. It looked like desks, chairs, tables, and dozens of boxes. Mostly, I saw room going to waste. I quickly descended.

  “Ma'am,” I said, “You have a lovely home, and the bedroom you showed me is just gorgeous, really. Your whole house is gorgeous. But ma'am, I am a terrible snorer. I'm so loud I wake myself up, and the room... well, it's awfully close to yours, and I would hate to move in and have you start having to wear earplugs at night, like my last roommate.”

  “You want to sleep in the garage?”

  “No ma'am. I want to transform your garage, turn it into livable space. If there's water d
ownstairs, I'll put in a decent bathroom. I'll rewire the whole building. I'll build in closets and install cabinets. And that's on top of doing the work you need on this house.”

  “Well, there will be materials,” she said, brushing dusty hands on her jeans. “I'll buy the materials, if you really can do all you say you can.”

  She extended her hand, and I took it. “I wouldn't say it if I couldn't,” I said.

  We shook. “Young man, you have a garage,” she said.

  That's how I met Veronica. Emptying out the garage, that's how we got to know each other. I spent the first night in the house, but I didn't even unmake the bed, but just rolled out my sleeping bag on top and went to sleep. When I awoke, it was to the smell of rich, strong, coffee. For breakfast we had toasted bagels with cream cheese and jam. My new landlady was dressed in Levi's and an Agnes Scott sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves.

  “You went to Agnes Scott?” I asked.

  “I didn't get it in a thrift store,” she answered. “I taught there, and yes, teaching at an all-female college was weird. Go ahead, make the joke.”

  “What joke?”

  “You never heard it called Anxious Twat?”

  “No.”

  “You didn't go to Georgia Tech.”

  “No ma'am, I didn't go to college. I joined the Army out of high school. I'm glad I served my country, but I knew after a few years that I didn't want to make a career of it. It wasn't bad. I learned how to get up in the morning.”

  Before noon we had filled the driveway from the garage to the kitchen door with two generations of accumulation. Her father had fished, and there were rods and reels and fly rods and flies and fly-tying kits, all dating from the 1950s. There were three wooden desks, two table and chair sets, but neither with an even number of chairs, three bookshelves, a twin set of head and foot boards used by Katherine and Veronica as children, their iron rails mysteriously absent, a dozen boxes of hardcover books, another dozen boxes of old ledger books with accounts meticulously kept by a trained hand, a kid's chemistry set, an Erector set, a pile of 78's, kids' records, 45's, and another dozen assorted fantastic antiques.

  Another heap of garbage out at the street awaited special pickup on Monday. All in all, the old lady and I had a busy and productive morning under our belts when we stopped at noon. I sat on one of the available chairs.

  “Tea, Addison?” Veronica asked. “Cold beer?”

  “The latter, please.”

  She came out with two and toasted me. “I can't thank you enough. I've been meaning to do this for the longest time, really. All this stuff...”

  “I guess you must feel some attachment,” I ventured. “You played with these games, you ate at these tables--”

  “It's just stuff. I guess we'll cover it with plastic and call Goodwill or something.”

  I looked again at the collection. It was just stuff, a lot of stuff. It looked like an antique dealer's booth. Then it hit me.

  “Veronica, how would you like to make some money?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Selling all this at Lakewood.” For years there was a huge monthly antique and collectible show in Atlanta, held at the historic Lakewood Fairgrounds. “I've known a few dealers whose stuff wasn't as nice as this.”

  She sipped her beer and eyed me curiously. “What kind of money? Talk to me.”

  All the real antiques went back into the garage on the bottom floor. I went upstairs, swept the floor, and rolled out my sleeping pad and bag. I've been there ever since.

  Veronica and I sold antiques together twice over the next two months and had a great time. She was one hell of a haggler, let me tell you that, and when we first arrived, she didn't even know how to price her merchandise. No kidding. As soon as we were set up, she left me to go get coffee and returned an hour later, having scouted all the booths with similar antiques. She made it hand over fist her very first show, and almost nobody does that. As we discovered, she also could drink any alcoholic with a booth, man or woman, under the folding table, but I'll tell that one another time. Just know that during my first two months under her roofs, Veronica and I got to know each other quite well, and a very close, very dear relationship developed between me and my then-fifty-eight year-old landlady. I often miss her. Eh. Getting ahead of myself.

  The garage became mine, top and bottom. The only major work was downstairs. The building's original design had a toilet with a sink built out five feet from the back wall, with a mop closet next to that, both rooms about three feet wide. This created two alcoves in the rear corners that were originally lined with shelves. I closed off the closet door and created a door between the toilet and old mop closet, which I converted into a walk-in shower. I installed glass-block windows in the back wall of each room to let in light and tiled the shower room up to the ceiling. All this took about a month or so, during which I slept upstairs and took showers in the house, but eventually the last grout was rubbed off the tile, and Veronica and I were both quite happy with the result. The alcove at right rear I turned into a walk-in closet. For the left rear alcove, we found a wrought-iron circular staircase for next to nothing, and I installed it.

  Upstairs, all I did was clean and paint. After removing a couple of layers of dirt and adding a couple of layers of wax, the old oak floors shone again. With new screens and a surplus motel window unit, I was set. Eventually I bought a bed, a lamp, and a bedside table. I got a deal on a loveseat and put it by the window for reading. Eventually I strung a coaxial cable from the house so I could have a television and internet connection. That memory is linked to an entirely separate chapter in which I helped Veronica buy a computer and get connected to the Internet. From her deciding and buying to her discovery of free Internet porn, it's a cherished chapter of my life genuinely funnier than a Lucy episode, but I digress considerably. The downstairs shelving lumber I sanded and reused to make bookshelves under the windows; then I bagged another lamp and a Persian rug for the reading area.

  No, the place has no kitchen, but downstairs are a toaster, a microwave oven, a two-element top burner, a charcoal grill I roll outside, and a mini-fridge. I get by. The aroma of any coffee made downstairs wafts up the circular staircase and lingers in the reading lounge by the window. It's home.

  I parked the truck, got out, and stretched my back. By the sound of Carole King coming from the house, I knew Veronica was painting. I grabbed my bag of laundry from the floorboard and headed for the kitchen door. On the way in, I slammed the screen door to make as much noise as possible.

  “That you, Addison?” came a voice from down the hall.

  “You'd better hope so,” I said.

  “Can you bring me a beer?”

  “Sure, if I can bring two. And a shot. Are you decent?”

  “Don't be impertinent, young man. The whiskey's in here. Hurry up with the beer.”

  I confess that most of what I know about painting I learned from Veronica. I learned about perspective, composition, and color; I learned to tell Impressionism from Cubism. I learned some painters like to paint from models, some from sketches, some from imagination, and some from photos. I learned some liked to work in watercolors or acrylics or mixed media, and some liked to work in oil. Veronica, I learned, was one of the latter. She worked almost exclusively in oil paints, and she worked almost exclusively in the nude.

  I discovered this about a month after I finished the bathroom in the garage. It was a lovely June Saturday, and I decided to do some laundry. Entering the kitchen, I noticed the house was quiet, so I was likewise instinctively quiet when I closed the door behind me. The laundry room is on the left just as you exit the kitchen to the hall, and when I stepped into the hallway, I heard her say, “Oh damn it, don't you break now.” Her voice was coming from her studio at the end of the hall. I walked down there to see if I could help and poked my head in. “Can I help--”

  She was bent over a boombox on the table, fussing with the cassette player. She was facing away, and I could have gotten away c
lean except for two things: I was thunderstruck by the totally unexpected phenomenon, and she turned around almost immediately, completing my view of Veronica naked.

  “Oh!” she said, covering her breasts with one arm and reaching for a robe.

  “Excuse me!” I said, turning away and walking out the door.

  Awkward? Only this part: my naked landlady didn't look too bad. Veronica must have inherited good genes or something. She wasn't very tall, maybe five-five or so, but she was still in great shape. Her skin was smooth and fairly taut. She had been born with jet-black hair, and the first gray came in streaks down either side of her face.

  At seventy, her shoulder-length hair had assumed a shiny medium gray, and those two streaks were bolts of snow-white lightning framing bright, blue-gray eyes. When I brought her a beer that Friday evening, she was robed in white silk on which she had painted branches of cherry blossoms. She had twisted her hair into a bun and secured it with a paintbrush, and with her fingers laced behind her neck, she stared at a canvas about three feet long and twenty inches high. On it, a sepia line jerked horizontally across the space, delineating mud colors across the bottom from blues across the top. She got a small footstool, no more than eighteen inches high, stood on it, and frowned at the canvas some more. She stepped down and without breaking her stare handed me a shot glass filled with amber liquid. I took it from her and handed her an open beer. She took a swig and spoke.