By and large we don’t mix much. We’re only dimly aware of them, and perhaps they’re only dimly aware of us. Our friends are new people too, and on Sunday mornings we cut the grass together. Their friends are the children of their parents’ friends, and their own uncles and cousins; on Sunday mornings they go to the old clapboard churches.
Howie was the exception, as I said. We were driving down U.S. 27—or rather, Howie was driving and I was sitting beside him smoking a cigar and having a look around. I saw a gate that was falling down, with a light that was leaning way over, and beyond it just glimpsed, a big, old, tumbledown wooden house with young trees sprouting in the front yard. It must have had about ten acres of ground, but there was a boarded-up fried-chicken franchise on one side of it and a service station on the other.
“That’s Redbeard’s place,” Howie told me.
I thought it was a family name, perhaps an anglicization of Barbarossa. I said, “It looks like a haunted house.”
“It is,” Howie said. “For me, anyway. I can’t go in there.”
We hit a chuckhole, and I looked over at him.
“I tried a couple times. Soon as I set my foot on that step, something says, ‘This is as far as you go, buster,’ and I turn around and head home.”
After a while I asked him who Redbeard was.
“This used to be just a country road,” Howie said. “They made it a Federal Highway back about the time I was born, and it got a lot of cars and trucks and stuff on it. Now the Interstate’s come through, and it’s going back to about what it was.
“Back before, a man name of Jackson used to live there. I don’t think anybody thought he was much different, except he didn’t get married till he was forty or so. But then, a lot of people around here used to do that. He married a girl named Sarah Sutter.”
I nodded, just to show Howie I was listening.
“She was a whole lot younger than him, nineteen or twenty. But she loved him—that’s what I always heard. Probably he was good to her, and so on. Gentle. You know?”
I said a lot of young women like that preferred older men.
“I guess. You know where Clinton is? Little place about fifteen miles over. There had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said this Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store there and had a farm. The one brother got the farm and the next oldest the store. This Jackson, he just got some money, but it was enough for him to come here and buy that place. It was about a hundred acres then.
“Anyhow, they caught him over in Clinton. One of those chancy things. It was winter, and dark already, and there’d been a little accident where a car hit a school bus that still had quite a few kids riding home. Nobody was killed as far as I heard or even hurt bad, but a few must have had bloody noses and so forth, and you couldn’t get by on the road. Just after the deputy’s car got there this Jackson pulled up, and the deputy told him to load some of the kids in the back and take them to the doctor’s.
“Jackson said he wouldn’t, he had to get back home. The deputy told him not to be a damned fool. The kids were hurt and he’d have to go back to Clinton anyhow to get onto Mill Road, because it would be half the night before they got that bus moved.
“Jackson still wouldn’t do it, and went to try and turn his pickup around. From the way he acted, the deputy figured there was something wrong. He shined his flash in the back, and there was something under a tarp there. When he saw that, he hollered for Jackson to stop and went over and jerked the tarp away. From what I hear, now he couldn’t do that because of not having a warrant and if he did, Jackson would have got off. Back then, nobody had heard of such foolishness. He jerked that tarp away, and there was a girl underneath, and she was dead. I don’t even know what her name was. Rosa or something like that, I guess. They were Italians that had come just a couple of years before.” Howie didn’t give
“Jackson was arrested, and they took him up to the county seat. I don’t know if he told them anything or not. I think he didn’t. His wife came up to see him, and then a day or so later the sheriff came to the house with a search warrant. He went all through it, and when he got to going through the cellars one of the doors was locked. He asked her for the key, but she said she didn’t have it. He said he’d have to bust down the door, and asked her what was in there. She said she didn’t know, and after a while it all came out—I mean, all as far as her understanding went.
“She told him that door had been shut ever since she and Jackson had been married. He’d told her he felt a man was entitled to some privacy, and that right there was his private place, and if she wanted a private place of her own she could have it, but to stay out of his. She’d taken one of the upstairs bedrooms and made it her sewing room.
“Nowadays they just make a basement and put everything on top, but these old houses have cellars with walls and rooms, just like upstairs. The reason is that they didn’t have the steel beams we use to hold everything up, so they had to build masonry walls underneath; if you built a couple of these, why, you had four rooms. The foundations of all these old houses are stone.”
I nodded again.
“This one room had a big, heavy door. The sheriff tried to knock it down, but he couldn’t. Finally he had to telephone around and get a bunch of men to help him. They found three girls in there.”
“Dead?” I asked Howie.
“That’s right. I don’t know what kind of shape they were in, but not very good, I guess. One had been gone over a year. That’s what I heard.”
As soon as I said it, I felt like a half-wit, but I was thinking of all the others, of John Gacy and Jack the Ripper and the dead black children of Atlanta, and I said, “Three? That was all he killed?”
“Four,” Howie told me, “counting the Italian girl in the truck. Most people thought it was enough. Only there was some others missing too, you know, in various places around the state, so the sheriff and some deputies tore
