A Short History of a Small Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

across the bedroom floor and out into the hallway, and had finally been subdued in the livingroom where the assailant wrenched loose one of the legs from an old ladderback chair and proceeded to render the victim unconscious with repeated blows to the frontal portion of the skull. He said the wounds sustained by the victim proved to be fatal and that the condition of the interior of the victim’s house suggested robbery as a probable motive. But Daddy said the thievery was just a sidelight. He said pure meanness was certainly the motive.
    In the several weeks that followed the murder, Deputy Burton kept talking about tips, and leads, and hunches, and lights at the end of the tunnel, but Sheriff Browner didn’t have anything on anybody, not any. thing at all. Then, in what appeared an episode of unrelated violence, two rail bums got into a knife fight out back by the loading dock of the Bright Leaf tobacco warehouse. The second shift was packing up a box. car for Richmond when the two of them came out from around the back. side of it already kicking and swearing at each other. The activity drained most everybody out from the warehouse and they collected on the dock where they watched those bums claw and spit and roll around in the high weeds of the right of way. Then they said one of them pulled a knife out from his trouser pocket. It wasn’t anything but a little hinged Barlow, they said, with about three and a half inches worth of blade and the point of that broken off, but they said. he waved it around like it was a saber and swore the other fellow a blue streak. And they said the other one reached inside his coat and brought out a hunk of steel nearly a foot long that had been rubbed down to a point at one end. Then they commenced to circling each other, they said, and swearing ferociously and eyeing each other out from under the ridge of their foreheads. And then they said they ran together like two old bulls and fell to slicing at each other as best they could. And they said in the first encounter alone the one with the little Barlow got his leg gashed and lost the most of his left ear and the other one had his cheek laid open from his eye all the way to his chin. Then they drew apart, they said, and circled some more until they came together again in a clench, and they said the one with the steel blade was clearly getting the best of it this time. The other one tried to break away, they said, and fell over backwards, and the one with the blade jumped on him and laid into him, and they said from up on the loading dock it sounded like he was sticking a plump melon.
    Then somebody went after the sheriff. The one with the little Barlow was long dead when he got there, and the other one was too cut and beat up himself to have the strength to run off. Deputy Burton took him away to the doctor’s and had him stitched up and fumigated before he locked him in the holding cell in the basement of the courthouse. Sheriff Browner stayed with the dead one, and what few men were left on the loading dock said the sheriff started going through that bum’s pockets and pulled out a handful of string, a few pennies, some foil, and one of Mrs. Doris Lancaster’s good silver forks. They said the sheriff fell back onto his haunches there in the high weeds and with that corpse stretched out in front of him, and they said he studied that fork for what seemed a quarter hour, just looked at it, they said. And then they said he put it down beside him and looked off beneath the carriage of the boxcar to the other side of the tracks and the weeds over there, and then back at that bum, and then at Mrs. Doris Lancaster’s fork where he’d set it next to him on the dirt.
    Daddy said since Sheriff Browner was quiet and private anyway nobody noticed when he became more quiet and more private, and that’s why Momma says we were shocked and couldn’t have known, but Daddy says we were just caught up in the glamor of violence and murder and