Jar of Pennies: MR

Chapter 1

Beaufort Sebastian Maclean shivered in his thin coat as a cascade of ice needles shattered down on his bare head from overhead pines. It was almost Christmas, 1979.

Nobody called him Beaufort Sebastian Maclean. Even his mother had called him Beau.

His friends, his very few friends, none of whom were female, called him BoMac. Everyone else in this little lumbering village in East Texas called him "that BS who edits the Standard. At 24, he got plenty of grief from those who thought themselves older and wiser, some of it far less innocent. The town’s only newspaper reporter, he was both popular and unpopular. He was popular with those who wanted their names in the weekly paper he produced. He was alternately unpopular when his stories were unflattering. Some weeks he could be best-friend popular with some and then despicable-enemy unpopular with the same people. One county commissioner, George Brown, was candid with him, and BoMac appreciated him for it. I hug everybody, Commissioner Brown had said, because I’m hugging a vote." Then he hugged BoMac. Even after the Standard ran a carefully researched article showing how the commissioner had skimmed money out of the 1978 budget for the county’s new jail, a consulting fee the audit called it, the commissioner hugged him the next time they met.

You’re a son of a bitch, he’d whispered to BoMac as he hugged him, the wintergreen smell of tobacco snuff heavy on his breath. But everybody who hates you loves me now. Ain’t no such thing as bad publicity for a politician.

I wish the sheriff felt that way, BoMac replied.

Some people are good people, but they’ve got small minds, the commissioner said, slapping him affectionately on the shoulder and grinning at him with tobacco-stained teeth as the crowd gathered for the monthly commissioners’ meeting.

I’d like to see more good, BoMac replied, but it was too late. The meeting was about to start, and Brown had already turned away.

BoMac dug his hands into his jacket pockets, remembering. That commissioners’ court meeting happened right over there on the first floor of the courthouse now sitting dark and silent in the late December night. The three-story Victorian brick edifice with its tall arched windows and strangely gothic corners could have been the setting for a horror movie, he thought, more terrifying than anything Hollywood could dream. The banality of the first floor, with its clerks and minor officials, contrasted starkly with the district courtroom on the second floor, a scene where men and their marriages met death and fate.

The first man executed in the newfangled electric chair at the state prison in Huntsville, Charles Reynolds, had received his death sentence for rape in that district courtroom. BoMac learned that Reynolds wailed incessantly that he didn’t do it. It was 1923. They could not shut him up. They tried opium, barbiturates, getting him drunk. That didn’t shut him up. Even in an opium daze he muttered and cried, I ain’t done it! I ain’t done it! While waiting for the carpenter to finish constructing the chair out of the wood formerly used for the gallows, his jailers, no doubt prodded by the incessant wailing, took to testing their homemade corn whiskey on him. The day of the execution, they gave him an extra pint to hush him up, and then guided him reeling to the chair.

Some of the folks in this little town of Whitmire, Texas, had complained about the expense of electrocution.

If hanging was good enough for my daddy, one man complained, it’s good enough for that sumbitch. BoMac assumed everyone agreed with the old coot, and he didn’t doubt that part of the story. All it took to hang someone was a rope and a stool. None of that newfangled technology.

BoMac had less faith in the rest of the story, though many took it for gospel truth. He was told Reynolds roused when his head was belted back against the chair with the electrode. His eyes popped wide, they said, and he began his wail again, I ain’t done it! I ain’t done it! All the guards looked at one another with that look of failure and shook their heads. The executioner put his hand on the knife switch, staring at the clock. When the minute hand ticked to midnight on February 8, he pulled the switch, and lights all over Huntsville dimmed. The lights went out completely in the execution chamber, but not before the guards saw Reynolds’s eyes bulging wide, his mouth dropping open as though screaming. Then the room went dark, and a long tongue of blue flame erupted from Reynolds’s mouth, lighting up his wild face. The moonshine had caught fire, and the executioner, startled, jerked the knife switch to off.

While jailers retched and vomited in the room from the smell of  burning flesh and the terror of the blue flame, Reynolds began moaning. I ain’t done, he moaned, jerking around on the chair.

He ain’t dead! yelled the jailers. Hit him again, Joe, they yelled at the executioner as the lights flickered back on in the room.

The executioner pulled the knife switch again and this time he left it on. When they finally turned it off and the lights came back on, they found that the electrodes had burned away Reynolds’s flesh all the way to the bone.

They electrocuted four more men that night, all, like Reynolds, Black. One of them was named George Washington. BoMac had looked it up.That part really happened.

Beats crucifixion, though, BoMac thought, glancing in the direction of the white cross on the top of the First Fundamentalist Church, gleaming like a white icon of execution and redemption in the dark mist half a block from the haunted courthouse.

In his three years listening to the people of Whitmire, he heard many stories, most of them partly if not completely fiction. But the murder trial that concluded today was not fiction. BoMac had a minor role to play in the case brought Jesse Grinder into that courtroom, adding him to the end of a long, grim parade of condemned heading to obscurity and extinction. The trial had been horrifying in its details, but all you could do was shake your head at the stupidity of it all. Grinder had no reason to kill that young mother and her three-year-old daughter. And now the haunted house of justice sat dark and silent in the winter night, all the judges and clerks and bailiffs and jurors gone and Jesse already incarcerated for what little remained of his life. The lights were off in the building. Only he  himself was moving on the square. No other sound but his careful shuffle on the icy sidewalk and the sighing wind in the frozen pines overhead could be heard.

Another puff of air coming down from the north dislodged more ice from the dark pines, showering it down on him.

The way the ice scattered over the sidewalk brought to mind his western civ class at the University of Virginia, stirring thoughts of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. That was the night when Hitler’s Nazi thugs prowled the dark streets of Germany breaking Jewish storefronts and burning books in what became a reign of terror, murder, and war, scattering broken glass over the streets.

He smirked at himself for the thought. That had happened long before he was born. History repeats, his professor had said. Well, no it doesn’t, he had come to realize in his three years on the Standard. It’s not history that repeats, but people. People are always the same. Just their methods change. We move from crucifixion to electric chairs to death needles. Same stuff, different methods.

At least this was ice and not glass, he thought, digging his hands deeper into his coat pockets, watching his labored breath fuming ahead of him.

Such dark thoughts.

Hill Street, creatively named hill because it went up a steep hill from the creek where the train once ran, was becoming treacherous in the icy night. He reminded himself to keep the police scanner on so he could go out with his camera to cover the wrecks that would surely happen on such a night. His old pickup, the only inheritance he received from his father’s bankrupt Virginia alfalfa farm, could probably get him just about anywhere. He’d need to take it easy, but the dirt roads would be safer. They would not get as slick as the paved ones. This was a temporary freeze, after all. Though ice had caught in the trees, the ground would not freeze, remaining muddy and potholed under its thin white skin.

Several times a week he went to fatal accidents somewhere in the county. He had seen a baby’s brains wiped across the pavement, decapitated bodies, wrecks so bad it took days to know how many people had been in the car. He spent one Saturday morning helping the county coroner—actually, the local undertaker with a side job as the coroner—hunting through roadside weeds for an eyeball missing from a wreck victim the night before. It was against state law to leave human remains on the side of the road, and they searched for an hour before giving up.

Probably some animal, John Quick, the mortician, had said. Unless that eyeball was sucked into his carburetor when he went through the engine compartment.

Yeah, BoMac said. Maybe an animal. I bet that engine wasn’t running by the time he went through the windshield. He smacked into that tree going pretty fast.

Heh heh, Quick chuckled. Maybe not. But he left the top half of his skull in there. I got that already. Scooped his brain out like an acorn squash. Just missing one of the eyes.

He was on his way to get married, wasn’t he? BoMac asked.

That’s what I heard. Works hard all day, gets his best boots on, and heads out to drive ninety-some miles to get married. Guess he went to sleep. I ain’t smelled no alcohol on him.

Yeah, BoMac said. Yeah. Lousy breaks.

We ain’t gonna find that boy’s eyeball, Quick finally said, pushing aside more weeds. He was sweating through his black suit. I’m gonna say it was taken by an animal.

Okay, BoMac had said. Okay.

And now it was dark December. So many more senseless deaths since that poor bridegroom.

He took another long look at the dark courthouse, looming in the freezing mist. Somewhere in the back, down below where the furnace was, one remaining human was in the Gothic pile. Davey Jones was sleeping in his old wooden chair, pretending to keep the furnace going. Once it had been a coal-fired furnace, and the county created a position for coal stoker. Davey had been the official coal stoker for fifty years. Even though the county had switched to electric heat decades ago, the commissioners never got around to abolishing the job of coal stoker. Besides, Davey was a harmless old Black man who needed the job. So, there he was, faithfully watching the electric furnace in the dark December midnight and collecting his pitiful salary.

And, BoMac knew, somewhere not far from Davey’s nodding head, back in the dark recesses under the courthouse, beyond the damp cellars and out under the floors where the pipes ran, was Old Coil, a slumbering rattlesnake, fattened on mice and rats, and just waiting for the breeding imperative of spring. Everybody knew Old Coil was there. He’d been spotted once or twice over the years, unless there was more than one snake. The most reliable reports said he was six or seven feet long, but others put his size at fourteen feet and one at sixteen. He was said to carry a hundred rattles on his tail, which would make him about a hundred years old. Same age, give or take a decade or two, as the courthouse. If you didn’t believe in ghosts, you could certainly believe in a courthouse

haunted by a deadly snake.

Sleep tight, Davey, BoMac thought. Try not to smell like a rat tonight.



Betty Lou, tell Henry I’m ready, said Mrs. Jane Elkins to her maid, shrugging into her mink coat. When she saw the powder-blue 1963 Cadillac pull into the portico, she went and stood by the kitchen door, waiting for Henry to open it for her. A lady never opened her own door. Moments later she was driven at no more than 10 mph down to her row of clapboard shacks on Railroad Avenue to collect weekly rents, drumming her gloved fingers on her black purse. This week she would evict John Coleman. He was just too uppity as a tenant.



Chapter 2

His garage apartment was uninsulated and cold, the electric space heater buzzing its dangerous glow over piles of paper stacked on every surface. He settled into his chair thinking over the trial, from time to time glancing at his reflection in the frosty window, tracking the dropping temperature by the splinters of frost creeping from the sash. It had all been so stupid! So unnecessary! Over the weekend, he would write up the report for next week’s paper, not that anyone didn’t know the outcome. No, they didn’t read the paper to learn new information. They read it to confirm what they already knew. Or, as one old woman had chuckled at him, who had got caught at it. But tonight, he would begin on his first book, a book about the murders, his mind unwinding and stretching through night shadows of cold and fear. The trial had reawakened the terror of the preceding summer, and he knew this was it. This was the start, the first step of his next career, and it would be about unnecessary tragedy.

He nodded to himself as he rolled a fresh sheet of paper into his antique Underwood typewriter, his mind poring over the short, brutish life of Jesse Grinder. In the chill outside, if you had passed by the rickety garage apartment, you would have heard the irregular tapping of his keys tattooing, on and on. Here, oh passerby, is the story you heard forming in the dark primeval forest where life balances so precariously, and people struggle to survive.

At the end of the fall semester of his sophomore year, Jesse Grinder dropped out of high school. He was sixteen. He didn’t see any use in it, since he wasn’t learning anything and didn’t want to. To celebrate, he drove his pickup down to the county line, where there was a liquor store, and bought a bottle of wine. It was his first time to drink, and he’d heard from friends that wine was the liquor of choice. He didn’t care much for it, but by the time he got back to Whitmire, he was pretty well plastered.

Jesse was a big boy. He was 6’2 or 6’3 and easily 245 pounds. He might have been more than that. His mother made him breakfast the next morning, which consisted of two pork chops, half a dozen eggs, a pan of cornbread, some buttermilk to dip the cornbread in, and a quart of coffee.

He ate it all. Then he went out in the backyard and threw up. He had a bell ringer of a hangover.

Then his father came out and beat hell out of him with a belt and told him he was going to work in the woods, hangover or not. So Jesse meekly followed his father out to the pickup and went to the woods. From dawn to sunset, he cut timber into eight-foot lengths and stacked it sideways on a log truck, lifting the logs by hand. Some of the logs weighed more than four hundred pounds, but he worked at it and learned how to handle the weight with the least effort. By noon, he’d sweated out the hangover and drunk three gallons of water. It was not easy work, but it was cool weather. He worked like that the rest of the afternoon, his father on one side of the truck and him on the other, throwing pulp wood logs up onto the racks of the log truck. When the truck was full, the driver who had been sleeping in a blanket in the cab woke up and drove off, and another truck pulled in to take his place.

That kind of work went on day after day, five days a week. They didn’t work seven days because the mills were closed on Sunday, and they went to church on Saturday. Otherwise, they would have. They needed the money. But they spent the one day off a week trying to grow vegetables in their garden and maybe doing a little hunting to put protein on the table. They were never much good at fishing, which required patience and a boat. And church took up all of Saturday.

Most White men found other, easier work, but the Grinders were not the kind who would do that. They were born poor, scrimped and saved, went to the Jehovah’s Witness church, and washed their few clothes in a nearby creek. The Witnesses were a good church for them, because the harder you worked, the more likely you would be one of the 144,000 chosen by God to go to heaven, according to the Book of Revelation.

Also, it didn’t have any Black members in the congregation. They were close-knit, even cultish in their fervor, and the Grinders found acceptance and validation for their earnest hard work with the Witnesses.

Jesse had a younger brother, Joey, who was even bigger than he was, and by the time Joey was fifteen and Jesse was nineteen, Joey could whip his ass. Jesse’s father could whip his ass, too, though he didn’t. Hell, even Jesse’s mother could whip his ass, because she was a large, blunt, and powerful woman. The four Grinders would have tipped the truck scales down at the feed depot at almost twelve hundred pounds. They were large people, and Jesse was the runt. He was the tallest, but he didn’t have the physical strength or sheer mass of his father and brother.

A life of really hard work could make a man out of some people. It sure seemed to make men out of Jesse’s father and brother. But Jesse had a little spending money now. He had an old beat-up pickup truck he could drive around in, and he got to burning up the highway to the county line on Friday nights. After his first experience with wine, he discovered that cheap vodka could mix into a Coca-Cola just fine, or a Big Red, which he preferred. Then he’d go looking around for a woman. Women were not that hard to find, if you didn’t set your sights too high, and he soon learned that he could have a good time with any of several older fat girls at the bars if he would just buy them something to drink.

By the time he was twenty-two, he had moved out and found other work. He worked in a warehouse, sweeping floors, and he got another job over at the patio furniture manufacturer stamping aluminum sheets. But that was seasonal work. They always shut down in the summer, because they’d moved all their stock out and wouldn’t need to start making any more until the following fall. So in the summer, he collected shopping carts in the parking lot at Walmart, and mopped floors at the Dairy Queen, and carried out the garbage at the Pizza Hut. He also would get fired from those jobs from time to time and go back to throwing pulpwood up onto log trucks. And he made a few friends, but really he figured he would just rather spend his time and money on those girls down at the county line, who were easy and less demanding.

He drifted away from his family, who missed his income but not his appetite, and that was that. He also stopped going to church. Obeying a higher power was not a big item on his agenda of things to do. He had a higher power. And her names were Sue, Peggy, and Margie at beer joints along the county line. He finally decided to get away from Whitmire altogether and drove off one day heading east until he came to a little city named Piney Creek and saw the Camelot Mobile Home Park with a for rent sign tilted out on the highway. That sign had been there a long time, he figured, the way it was almost fallen over, so he drove into the park to look around. These were his kind of people. They hung their wash out on lines beside their trailers, their dirty little kids scampered around outside barefoot, the only men were cadaverous looking smokers arced over like flood-bent reeds and hacking at their cigarettes, and they were all White. But the manager said he didn’t want someone like Jesse living there, money or no money. Jesse had to have a job, and he had to be gone all day. Those were the rules. Job, and gone. Jesse just stood there, kind of looking at his toes, trying to think of something that might change the man’s opinion, and then the door to the man’s trailer opened and a bosomy, youngish woman came in.

I’m here to pay on the rent, she said to the manager.

Son, what’s your name? the manager asked Jesse.

Jesse Grinder.

Well, Jesse, just wait outside for me for a few minutes.

Okay, Jesse said.

As he left, he heard the manager say to the woman, Honey, just lock that door and come over here. Take off your top.

Jesse stood around outside in the shade of a corrugated metal carport attached to the manager’s trailer. He just looked around. If he’d had an idea, it would have drowned in his brain.

About twenty minutes later, the woman came out of the trailer and caught Jesse’s eye. She spat.

Be glad you ain’t born a woman, she said at him, and then went away.

Jesse didn’t much like the manager. He was an older man, balding, and his eyelids were sewn up to his eyebrows with catgut, some kind of medical thing to keep the lids from drooping. Jesse wasn’t disgusted. Just confused.

He stood around outside waiting for another thirty minutes. Eventually the man showed and acted surprised.

You still here? he asked Jesse.

Guess so, Jesse said.

You must be hard up.

Nope. I just like it around here. What’s that girl’s name?

Oh her? the manager replied. Her name is Annabeth. She’s married to a guy who works offshore named Shorty. They have a baby daughter.

Uh huh, Jesse said. He just stood there waiting.

Well, okay, the manager said, if you’ve got $200, I can show you a place I’ve got not far from here and you can have that. The rent is $105 a month and you pay utilities. We are on a water well out here, so there’s no charge for the water. Your rent keeps the pump going. The way things are these days, I’ve got to keep a place open for Blacks if they want to rent out here or I get in trouble with the gummint. So this is the place I keep. It’s not much, but it’s private and it’s away from these other folks. You don’t mind that, I’m sure, he said, sizing up Jesse, taking in the cheap Walmart clothes and the boots just about worn completely out.

Well, okay, Jesse said.

They drove out in the manager’s pickup and looked at it. It was a single-wide trailer with two bedrooms, one end jacked up five feet off the ground because of the slope.

We ain’t got sewer out here, the manager said. The toilet just empties out underneath the house. That shouldn’t be much of a problem, less you have dogs or kids.

Don’t it stink? Jesse asked.

That’s what the air conditioning is for, the manager replied, pointing to the two window units hanging at steep angles out of the sides of the trailer. Besides, it all runs downhill, and if you go down there, you’ll find the nicest batch of tomatoes growing wild you ever seen.

Guess I’ll take it, Jesse said, pulling out the last of his money. He’d drive to the next town and get some kind of job. It would mean skipping Margie and Peggy for a few weeks, but hell, those girls were not going anywhere. Sue, though. He really didn’t want to skip Sue. Jesse didn’t know much more than what his father and the Witnesses had beat into him, and that was that money was work and work was salvation. He didn’t mind work if that was the only way to get money. And that big girl Sue, with her big boobs. Why, maybe she’d move in with him. If he had the money. And the booze.

And there was Annabeth.



Photos this week: burning bus, upside-down Crown Vic in the creek (no body visible), candlelight service at First Fundamentalist Church. That would be a nice photo, with six hundred people holding up candles and filing out singing Silent Night, that big Christmas tree in the front all lit up. What were those symbols they hung on the tree? Chrismons? Was that right? Check spelling for cutline. Girl Scouts in front of Walmart, with Salvation Army Santa. One of the Christmas tour mansions garlanded and festooned. Maybe with Ms. Needle posed in front. The other house fire? Did he have that?



Chapter 3

Grinder got a job over in Piney Creek making a little money, and one night he drove down to see Sue. She was at the bar, like always, and they sat together in a booth giggling. She liked being touched, and when he put his hand on her thigh, she rested her hand on his. When he moved up a little further, she slid her hand over to the inside of his thigh.

Then they were in the front seat of his pickup, which was okay for a blow job but not much good for really getting at her, when he asked if she could go with him somewhere.

Come back to my place, she sighed. Richard is there, but he won’t mind.

Who’s Richard? Jesse thought to ask.

He’s the guy I married. Used to work on radio towers. Went up to service a tower one day and the guys on the ground thought it’d be funny if they turned it on while he was up there. Zapped him pretty good. He can’t get it up no more and gave up trying. He won’t mind.

You sure?

Yeah. It ain’t like I never done it before.

I’m pretty tired.

You don’t feel tired, she said, stroking him. Gimme some money and I’ll go back inside and get us some beer, then we can go over.

Okay, he said, digging his wallet out of his unzipped pants. He gave her a twenty-dollar bill.

Be right back, she said happily, like a girl.

They drove over to her house, about a mile from the bar. It was dark, a small bungalow with a concrete stoop. A plastic garbage can full of empty cans sat next to the door. The door wasn’t locked, and she walked in, leading him by the hand.

Just a minute, she said, flipping a light switch and heading through a dark interior door.

Richard? Hey Richard, wake up. I need the bed, he heard her say. Come on, wake up. Go sleep on the sofa.

He heard a male voice, indistinct.

Come on. I’ll help you sit up.

A minute later a man in a tee shirt and boxer shorts leaned against the doorframe, his skeletal frame shaking. He stared at Jesse for a minute with bloodshot eyes, then staggered over to the sofa. He was asleep again by the time he hit the cushions.

I’ll just turn on the TV, Sue said. He’ll sleep right through everything like you was never here, and she took Jesse by the hand to lead him into the bedroom, holding the six-pack in her other hand.

Much later, on his way back to the Piney Creek mobile home park, Jesse rolled his truck in a ditch and was in a coma for three days. When he woke up in the hospital, he saw his mother sitting there, watching him.

You gonna kill me, boy, she said when she saw his eyes open. You gonna kill me with all this. You remember what happened?

He couldn’t shake his head for the neck brace.

Naw, he mumbled. Where am I?

You’re in the hospital in Lufkin, she said. Cops found you in a ditch and they brought you here. You been asleep for three days and your leg’s broke. They’s worried about your head. I’ve been sitting here the whole time.

What about Pop? he asked.

She looked at him like he was crazy. What do you think? He’s working extra to help you get through this. Him and Joey both. Joey’s going to the woods during daylight and working at a call center all night.

Yeah. Okay then. He closed his eyes.



News budget for the week between Christmas and New Year’s: Girl Scout cookie sale proceeds, Lions Club chili dinner at the firehouse, fatal wreck when Essie Wainwright, eighty-two, slid her car backward off an icy bridge into Toby Creek, three home burglaries mostly of Christmas presents (already wrapped ) but including one television, six DWIs (ignore peccadillos at Christmas?), proceeds from the Ladies Book Club home tour benefiting their $500 scholarship fund, three obits including Ms. Wainwright, two house fires including one of a school bus occupied by a seventeen-year-old pregnant girl and her year-old tot. No school or county news.



Ellen Etheridge took a final look around her cozy little house, checked the thermostat, added an extra cup of water to each of her thirty houseplants, and urged the grumpy cat into its cardboard carrier. It will only be a little while, she chirped, then we’ll be at Momma’s. She lifted the satchel of term papers in one hand, the cat carrier in the other, and went out to get in her Honda Civic for the drive to Sugar Land and Christmas. The wrapped Christmas presents were already in the trunk, along with her gym clothes. At last, she breathed.



Chapter 4

Jesse Grinder was out of the hospital in a month and back at work with his neck still in a brace, sending his mother half his pay to cover the $69,000 hospital bill his family had paid. It would take him eight years and leave him about $400 a month to pay rent and buy groceries. He qualified for food stamps but was too proud to apply and Witnesses didn’t take charity. Besides, he was taught to work, not beg. His job was sweeping up at a welding shop, and then doing the same at a service station next door. Both places closed by 8 p.m., and he walked down the highway to hitch a ride back to his trailer. Sometimes a trucker would pick him up. Sometimes he walked the whole seven miles in the dark. He didn’t mind. Wasn’t much