Joe Lansdale - The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

“He had her purse?” Mama said.

“Yeah.” Daddy said. “He had it, and he’d taken money from it.”

“Could it be him?”

“He says he was fishing, saw the purse and her dress floating, snagged the purse with his fishing line. He saw there was money inside, and he took it. He said he figured a purse in the river wasn’t something anyone was going to find, and there wasn’t any name in it, and it was just five dollars going to waste. He said he didn’t even consider that someone had been murdered. It could have happened that way. Personally, I believe him. I’ve known old Mose all my life. He taught me how to fish. He practically lives on that river in that boat of his. He wouldn’t harm a fly. Besides, the man’s seventy years old and not in the best of health. He’s had a hell of a life. His wife ran off forty years ago and he’s never gotten over it. His son disappeared when he was a youngster. Whoever raped this woman had to be pretty strong. She was young enough, and from the way her body looked, she put up a pretty good fight. Man did this had to be strong enough to… Well, she was cut up pretty bad. Same as the other women. Slashes along the breasts. Her hand hacked off at the wrist. We didn’t find it.”

“Oh dear.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“How did you come by the purse?”

“I went by to see Mose. Like I always do when I’m down on the river. It was layin’ on the table in his shack. I had to arrest him. I don’t know I should have now. Maybe I should have just taken the purse and said I found it. I mean, I believe him. But I don’t have evidence one way or the other.”

“Hon, didn’t Mose have some trouble before?”

“When his wife ran off some thought he’d killed her. She was fairly loose. That was the rumor. Nothing ever came of it.”

“But he could have done it?”

“I suppose.”

“And wasn’t there something about his boy?”

“Telly was the boy’s name. He was addleheaded. Mose claimed that’s why his wife run off. She was embarrassed by that addleheaded boy. Kid disappeared four or five years later and Mose never talked about it. Some thought he killed him too. But that’s just rumor. White folks talkin’ about colored folks like they do. I believe his wife ran off. The boy wasn’t much of a thinker, and he may have run off too. He liked to roam the woods and river. He might have drowned, fallen in some hole somewhere and never got out.”

“But none of that makes it look good for Mose, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“What are you gonna do, Jacob?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid to lock him up over at the courthouse. It isn’t a real jail anyway, and word gets around a colored man was involved, there won’t be any real thinking on the matter. I talked Bill Smoote into letting me keep Mose over at his bait house.”

“Couldn’t Mose just run away?”

“I suppose. But he’s not in that good a health, hon. And he trusts me to investigate, clear him. That’s what makes me nervous. I don’t know how. I thought about talking to the Mission Creek police, as they have more experience, but they have a tendency to be a little emotional themselves. Rumor is, sheriff over there is in the Klan, or used to be. Frankly, I’m not sure what to do.”

I began to drift off again. I thought of Mose. He was an old colored man who got around on shore with use of a cane. He had white blood in him. Red in his hair, and eyes as green as spring leaves. Mostly you saw him in his little rowboat fishing. He lived in a shack alongside the river not more than three miles from us. Living off the fish he caught, the squirrels he shot. Sometimes, when we had a good day hunting or fishing, Daddy would go by there and give Mose a squirrel or some fish. Mose was always glad to see us, or seemed to be. Up until a year ago, I used to go fishing with him. It was then Jake told me I ought not. That it wasn’t right to be seen with a nigger all the time.

Thinking back on that, I felt sick to my stomach, confused. Mose had taught my daddy to fish, I had gone fishing with him, and suddenly I deserted him because of what Jake had said.

I thought of the Goat Man again. I recalled him standing below the swinging bridge, looking up through the shadows at me. I thought of him near our house, watching. The Goat Man had killed those women, I knew it. And Mose was gonna take the blame for what he had done.

It was there in the car, battered by the cool October wind, that I began to formulate a plan to find the Goat Man and free Mose. I thought on it for several days after, and I think maybe I had begun to come up with something that seemed like a good idea to me: It probably wasn’t. Just some thirteen-year-old’s idea of a plan. But it didn’t really matter. Shortly thereafter, things turned for the worse.

It was a Monday, a couple days later, and Daddy was off from the barbershop that day. He had already gotten up and fed the livestock, and as daybreak was making through the trees, he come and got me up to help tote water from the well to the house. Mama was in the kitchen cooking grits, biscuits, and fatback for breakfast.

Me and Daddy had a bucket of water apiece and were carrying them back to the house, when I said, “Daddy. You ever figure out what you’re gonna do with Ole Mose?”

He paused a moment. “How’d you know about that?”

“I heard you and Mama talkin’.”

He nodded, and we started walking again. “I can’t leave him where he is for good. Someone will get onto it. I reckon I’m gonna have to take him to the courthouse or let him go. There’s no real evidence against him, just some circumstantial stuff. But a colored man, a white woman, and a hint of suspicion… He’ll never get a fair trial. I got to be sure myself he didn’t do it.”

“Ain’t you?”

We were on the back porch now, and Daddy set his bucket down and set mine down too. “You know, I reckon I am. If no one ever knows who it was I arrested, he can go on about his business. I ain’t got nothin’ on him. Not really. Something else comes up, some real evidence against him, I know where he is.”

“Mose couldn’t have killed those women. He hardly gets around, Daddy.”

I saw his face redden. “Yeah. You’re right.”

He picked up both buckets and carried them into the house. Mama had the food on the table, and Tom was sitting there with her eyes squinted, looking as if she were going to fall face forward in her grits any moment. Normally, there’d be school, but the schoolteacher had quit and they hadn’t hired another yet, so we had nowhere to go that day, me and Tom.

I think that was part of the reason Daddy asked me to go with him after breakfast. That, and I figured he wanted some company. He told me he had decided to go down and let Mose loose.

We drove over to Bill Smoote’s. Bill owned an icehouse down by the river. It was a big room really, with sawdust and ice packed in there, and people came and bought it by car or by boat on the river. He sold right smart of it. Up behind the icehouse was the little house where Bill lived with his wife and two daughters that looked as if they had fallen out of an ugly tree, hit every branch on the way down, then smacked the dirt solid. They was always smilin’ at me and such, and it made me nervous.

Behind Mr. Smoote’s house was his barn, really more of a big, ole shed. That’s where Daddy said Mose was kept. As we pulled up at Mr. Smoote’s place alongside the river, we saw the yard was full of cars, wagons, horses, mules, and people. It was early morning still, and the sunlight fell through the trees like Christmas decorations, and the river was red with the morning sun, and the people in the yard were painted with the same red light as the river.