Red Grass River

seen the four bandits under arrest and with their hands cuffed. No amount of badgering by either of the two lawyers for the cops could make either one change a word of their story. The coroner’s jurymen looked to be hanging on every word of the boys’ testimony. None of them had seen any marks on the men’s wrists when they went to the bridge, but like one of them said later, it had been dark and none of them had had reason to look very closely at the men’s wrists anyway. When Adams made a motion to have the bodies exhumed so they could be examined for handcuff marks, several of the jurymen nodded like they thought that was a fine idea.

The judge didnt think so. He said the question of whether the jurymen had seen marks on the dead men’s wrists when they went to the bridge to view the bodies now made them material witnesses and so they couldnt serve as impartial jurors. He disbanded the jury and said he would impanel a new one and hold another inquest in three] days.

And thats exactly what he did. The new inquest took place on the following Saturday and this time the cops took the stand, all seven of them in their turn, and every one of them said he had shot in self-defense when the prisoners—who were not handcuffed and probably acting on a secret signal from John Ashley—all made a try for their guns at the same time. After all the testimony had been given, the coroner’s jury reached a unanimous decision of justifiable homicide.

Some folk couldnt believe it. Some still dont. The suspicions about what happened on the Sebastian River Bridge that night of November first, nineteen and twenty-four, will probably never go away. Hell, our own Liars Club been arguing about it all our lives, and some of us side with the cops’ version and some with the Ashley’s’. Ever few years one local newspaper or another will bring up the story of the Ashley Gang but they dont say anything we aint heard a hundred times before.

One more thing. Before John Ashley’s body was in the ground a week there were stories going around that when his body got to the undertaker’s it was missing its glass eye. Everybody knew somebody who claimed to know somebody who’d seen the body laying in front of the undertaker’s and seen that the eye was missing, but nobody ever said they’d seen so with their own two eyes. The undertaker said the eye was in place when he did the embalming, but some say he was too scared to tell the truth, which is that one of the cops took it and gave it to Bobby Baker, who’d always said he meant to have it. But Bobby always denied that anybody’d given him the eye and said the only way he ever wanted to have it was if he could of taken off John Ashley himself. The Ashley family—what was left of it, Ma and Bill and the sisters—they all said the eye was buried with John, but how would they know unless they opened his eye to check and nobody saw them do it when they came for the body at the undertaker’s. Maybe they checked for it before they buried him and it really was there. Or maybe, like some say, they were just trying to save face by not admitting that somebody got the best of John Ashley at the end by making off with his eye.

It’s just one more thing the Liars Club been arguin about for years and years.

TWENTY-NINE

December 1924

A GUSTY GRAY EVENING OF UNSEASONABLE RAIN A FEW DAYS BEFORE Christmas. He arrived home and parked the car under the wide live oak to one side of the house and cut off the motor. The rain pattered on the car roof as he buttoned his yellow rainslicker and tugged down his hat.

He was just about to get out of the car when the passenger-side door opened and a figure in sopping clothes and a black hat with a wide downturned brim streaming with rainwater stood there holding an army .45 pointed at him.

“Give me it.” She coughed wetly several times—hacking so hard the veins stood out on her neck.

It took him a moment to recognize her. He’d not seen her since the raid on the Ashley whiskey camp when she sat against a tree with blood stating her pantleg and running from her hair. That had been not quite a year ago but she looked to have aged far beyond that. She was obviously sick—perhaps with only a bad cold, although the cough sounded bad enough to be consumptive. Her eyes were redly swollen.

”Give me it!” she said, and again fell to hacking, her eyes straining on him, flooding with tears.

“Give you what?” he said. “And you best get that gun off me right goddamn now.” The tightness in his voice surprised and angered him.

She coughed wetly and leaned into the car and cocked the pistol. “I didnt come all this way to listen to your bullshit,” she said in a strained rasp. “Give me it or I’ll put one in your brainpan and you best fucken believe i mean it.”

“Now just hold on,” he said, raising his hands slightly, palms out. He shifted his weight imperceptibly, readying himself. “What makes you think I got it? I wasnt even there. Everybody knows that.”

“You got it,” she said. “I know you do.” She leaned closer and put the muzzle within inches of his eye. “Now give—”

Another hacking fit before her and she sagged under its force and her eyes lost focus and in that instant he snatched and twisted her wrist and took the gun from her and grabbed her by the shirtfront and the shirt ripped as he pulled her forward onto the car seat and off her feet and her hat fell away and her hair spilled onto the car seat as he wrestled her around onto her back. She kicked and struggled to right herself but he pinned her under his weight with one hand and pressed the pistol muzzle to her cheekbone just under her eye.

“You sorry bitch!” he said. “Point a gun at me! I ought blow your brains out.”

“Give me…it,” she said, sickly breathless, coughing and half-choking, mucus coursing from her nose, her hands weakly pushing at his flexed arm pinioning her. “Give me.”

“I aint got it!” His voice sounded made of tin.

“Liar!” she rasped. “Black liar! I know they gave it to you, I know it! You dont—” She gagged on mucus, her face darkening, and for a moment he thought she might strangle to death. But she managed a deep rattled breath and said, “Give me it or kill me, you son of a bitch—or I’ll kill you, I swear I will. I’ll kill you if I got to”—she hacked, choked, rasped on—“if I got to crawl on my hands and knees through hell.” She seemed entirely indifferent to the pistol muzzle against her face.

Her breasts were heaving and one was almost wholly exposed where her shirt had torn. Fixed on his face, her eyes burned redly in their dark hollows. It’s all of him left in the world, you low bastard. It belongs to me. Give…me…it.”

She struggled in his grip with a sudden rush of strength and it was all he could do to hold her down.

“God damn, woman, you wanna get shot?” he said. She craned her head forward and tried to bite his arm. He cursed and hit her in the mouth with the gun butt and split her lip against her teeth and her strength swelled in her fury and she tried to spit blood up in his face and then she was choking again and fell back and turned her head aside and hacked up bile and mucus onto the car seat. She gasped as someone drowning. “Give…me…it,” she managed. “Give me it….”

She looked up at him with her burning eyes and he saw that she was not even a little bit afraid, not of anything. Not of him not of pain, not of dying. Not of any truth of trial in the world.

And he knew that was not true of himself. And felt his chest tighten with an awful familiarity. Felt his own breath hard to draw.

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You’re crazy as he was.”

But he knew it was as she’d said: he would have to give it to her or he would have to kill her.

Oh hell, he thought. Oh hell.

He drew away from her and she scrabbled to her knees on the car seat and turned her wild face to him as he probed under his slicker and into his vest pocket and took out the watch and fob. He had never shown it to anyone for fear of the questions it would raise—and so had not derived the pleasure from its possession he thought he would, the pleasure he thought was his due.

She looked on it and her face fell. She was crying softly and could not take her eyes off it as he removed it