A New Story Most Thursdays

Another Edition of Thursday Stories…

Hello Friends and Neighbors, and welcome to Thursday Stories. Looking back over my herd of short stories, I realize that more than three dozen of the little rascals have appeared only in print. Some of you may have forked over the dough for this or that literary review, but I don’t expect everyone to buy all of the reviews all of the time. And so, drumroll please, I give you Thursday Stories. I’m not guaranteeing a new story every Thursday, but I will do my best until all the print-only tales have been set free.

This week’s edition of Thursday Stories features Things Broken, Things Lost. This story first appeared in The McNeeese Review Journal, published in 2023. Content warning: This is a hard story about hard times, including the murders of two young girls. Now, without further ado, I give you another edition of Thursday Stories. I hope you enjoy it.

Things Broken, Things Lost

Marco Etheridge

Everyone loves him now that he is the famous James Hill, but back when he was Jamie Tyler, and a monster, it was a different story. You have to tell it so they understand you. They have to know that the real story is dangerous. It’s not any of James Hill’s revenge you worry about. He can’t do anything worse to you than he’s already done. You’ve known him since you were both boys, back when he still answered to Jamie. Back before those two little girls disappeared.

No, the high and mighty James Hill isn’t any danger to you. He’s just another two-bit hero. But you can’t forget about the townsfolk, how Sheriff James Hill is their local myth. You can deface small-town icons, but only at your own peril. Sheriff Hill is their myth, and you’re no more than the local crackpot. People get angry when their mythology is threatened. Angry folks are fearful, and fearful people are dangerous. You damn sure better keep that in mind.

Whatever names they hang on you, you remember it all. Don’t matter what everyone else chooses to forget. It’s you that can see the creek running through this dying town, you who can follow it upstream to where it cuts through the shale and the years.

There are patches of bottomland scattered along that rocky creek, and small farms where the soil isn’t too rocky to plow. You grew up on one of those farms. The Tylers, they had the farm opposite your daddy’s patch, just the other side of that wandering creek.

You and Jamie were both born after the war when country boys made their way back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. Some of them came back whole and some of them came back broken. Those boys, newly forged into men, they settled down, picked up what there was to pick up, and got on with it.

Your daddy was one of the broken ones. He lost some of himself on those Pacific Islands, like pieces missing from a jigsaw puzzle. He came back, married your ma, took up working the farm, but he never found those fractured pieces.

The world wouldn’t fit with his brokenness, so he tried to break everything around him, including you. It was the only way he could make the inside and outside match up. That’s how you ended up with your gimpy leg. It was whiskey, your daddy, and his emptiness that broke your leg in three places. Like everything else that got close to your daddy, it never did heal straight.

You were thirteen when a tractor and harrow broke him for good. It goes to show you that whiskey and tractors don’t mix. That big rear tire ran over him when he fell off the seat, then the harrow disks carved him up good.

He was a tough old cob, your daddy. Even sliced and harrowed as bad as he was, the old man might have survived if someone had gone for help. But you didn’t see much point in that. You watched until that leg-breaking bastard bled out. Then you shut off the tractor engine and limped back up to the house to tell your ma.

It was four years later when those two girls disappeared. You remember that June afternoon like it was yesterday. It was a Thursday. School was out, and come September, you’d be going back as a senior. The plowing and planting were wrapped up. Your chores were done.

You ended up on the other side of the creek, hanging around while Jamie and his crew bent over the engine of an old pickup. They were all a year older than you, just graduated high school. Three of them, Kurt Banks, Billy Russell, and Jamie the lead hound.

They weren’t friends of yours or even friendly. They tolerated you, that was it, and only as long as you kept quiet. You always figured that Miz Taylor told Jamie he had to be decent to you on account of your being an orphan and crippled. Jamie’s idea of decent probably differed some from what his mama intended.

Those three boys were messing with that old pickup, jawing about being free of high school and what was coming next. You were leaned up against a stack of firewood, smiling at whatever crap they were spewing. Jamie’s folks were down to Springfield with an aunt and uncle, shopping at the big town stores.

The adults left Jamie in charge of his kid sister and her cousin. Those two little girls got bologna sandwiches and threats about what would happen to them if Jamie caught them near the creek. After that, he left them on their own.

You were just happy to be there, happy to be anywhere away from the farm and your mama’s sad eyes. Mostly you were just the butt of their jokes, but it beat sitting alone in the barn. Jamie and his pals were talking shit about Vietnam, whether it was better to wait for the draft or sign up now. Jamie was arguing the Marines as a better choice. Then they shifted to Vietnamese girls, and how great they were, talking like they knew a damn thing.

You forgot yourself and let out a chuckle over their bullshit. Then an oily rag smacked you in the face. Those three had swung away from the pickup, looking at you like you were dogshit.

“What the fuck are you laughing at, Gimp?”

“Yeah, like you know anything about it.”

“Better watch him, Jamie. He’s gonna be hounding all the girls around here while we’re over in Nam. Won’t be no competition for the Gimp, what with all the able-bodied boys gone off to war. Ain’t that right, Gimpy?”

You ducked your head, smiling like always, hoping to pass it off as a joke. It was Jamie cut in the hardest, and he wasn’t smiling.

“I got nothing to worry about and neither do you two clowns. Gimpy here hobbles around like Chester on Gunsmoke. They wouldn’t even take him in the damn Coast Guard. Ain’t no girl in her right mind going to give old Gimp a second look.”

That was just like Jamie Tyler, always ready and willing to kick you back into your place at the bottom. You laughed along with Jamie’s pals, nodding your head, but inside it was different. Inside, down in your guts, it burned like you were being cooked alive.

They turned back to the truck, ignored you like you didn’t exist. That’s when you saw the keyring. It was sitting right there beside you on the woodpile, a steel ring with two keys. Attached to the ring was a big fob.

It was the kind of thing you got from a booth at the county fair, where a carney would engrave your initials on the fob while you wait. The initials cut into the cheap pot metal read JT. Without a thought, your hand covered the keyring and slipped it into the pocket of your overalls.

Those three never noticed a thing, all of them still bent over that broken-down pickup. You leaned against the woodpile, felt those stolen keys poking against your thigh. You heard girlish shrieks coming from the old barn, the high-pitched notes of giggling and chasing. Behind the barn, where oaks and hickory pushed up against the cleared land, the cicadas were singing like buzzsaws. For a heartbeat, two, three, time froze.

Then Jamie pushed himself out from under the hood and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his t-shirt.

“It’s getting too hot for this shit. Time for a beer. The old man left me a six-pack. We best drink it before they get back.”

Them other two started to fall in with him, but Jamie stopped and gave you the eye.

“You still here, Gimpy? Best you head on home. You ain’t legal to drink yet, and six beers don’t split four ways.”

He threw a thumb over his shoulder, back down over the creek towards your patch of farm. Then they were gone, the three of them, heading up to the house and you already forgotten.

Twenty years ago and you can still picture every detail of that moment like you’re watching it on a movie screen. Three boys walk up to an old farmhouse, leaving you leaning against a woodpile. You push yourself up, dust off the seat of your overalls, feel the stolen keys jangling in your pocket.

You walk down to the old barn and stop. The shrieking of the girls has gone quiet now. Not a sound comes from the dusty shadows inside. The cicadas under the trees cease their shrill buzzing. You look past the barn, see the well-worn path that leads between the tree trunks to the shale banks of the creek. Across the creek is the farm, your own land, where no one laughs at you.

That was the start of it, right there in that moment. Whatever happened next, the panic that followed, all the uproar, the searching, the frustration, all of it stemmed from that single tick in time.

Looking back over the years, the facts are simple. Two young girls disappeared from an old barn. No one saw them leave, no one saw any sign of an intruder, no one found the tracks of some murderous tramp. The two girls vanished into thin air as completely as if they’d been conjured away. And no one ever found their bodies. Whatever fate took those children, no trace of them was ever found.

And yet somehow, twenty and more years later, those missing girls have been erased from the local history. It’s like some kind of collective amnesia. You can’t explain it any other way. Are you the only one with a conscience left in this town? You remember that day like it was yesterday. You know for a fact that it happened, that those two girls are dead and gone. But god help you if you mutter one of their names out loud.

When Jamie Tyler’s folks drove back up to their farm, it was just another Thursday in June, a too-warm afternoon breaking towards evening. The adults rousted Jamie from a nap, sent him out to call the girls in to wash up for supper. Jamie came back empty-handed. The two women went out to find those girls and give them what for. It wasn’t long after that when all hell broke loose.

It was Bill Tyler, Jamie’s pa, who showed up at your farmhouse, his face twisted up with worry. He apologized to my ma for interrupting our supper, asked if he could speak to you. You remember the way he asked it of your ma, could he speak to Thomas for a moment. Something important. Thomas, not Gimpy.

The big man nodded his head towards the door and you followed him out onto the porch. Outside, away from your ma, his voice was ragged.

“Thomas, have you seen those two girls, our Ellen, and her cousin? We can’t find them and we don’t know what the hell they could have got up to.”

“No sir, I haven’t seen them. They were playing in the barn when I come back down here.”

Jamie’s pa kneaded the side of his face, looked back down your field to the trees along the creek line.

“Son, what time do you reckon that was?”

“I don’t know exactly, sir, but it was getting hot. I guess it must have been two, two-thirty.”

“Dammit, that’s four hours, and no one’s seen them.”

“Maybe they fell asleep in the barn.”

“They ain’t in the barn and they ain’t in the house. The women are going crazy looking for them two girls, screaming and carrying on. Jamie was asleep when we got home. He says the girls were right there the whole time, but they sure as hell aren’t there now.”

Bill Tyler looked up at the evening sky.

“Three hours till full dark. I better call the sheriff so we can get up a search.”

“You can use our phone, Mister Tyler. I’ll get some flashlights and such.”

While Bill Tyler was on the phone to the sheriff, you explained to your ma. She didn’t understand, but that was nothing new. Instead of asking questions, she wrapped up the last of the meat and cornbread from your supper.

You grabbed the big nine-volt light from the shelf by the back door, then grabbed an extra battery. You remember that, the weight of that second battery in your hand, like you knew you were going to be out in the woods all night.

Your ma had everything packed in a tote sack by the time you laced up your boots. Then you were outside and walking fast beside Bill Tyler, taking the field down to the creek in long strides.

You were out beating the brush all that evening and most of that night. Counting the Tyler clan, the sheriff and his two deputies, and what neighbors could be rounded up, there must have been twenty-five flashlight beams slicing through the night. And the whole time folks were crashing through the brush or splashing into the creek, they were yelling those girls’ names. The only thing anyone found was a broken ankle when one of the Tyler women fell into a shale hole.

The next day, the searchers were at it again. You were already there when the sheriff rolled down the drive to the Tyler farm. Driving in behind the sheriff was a flatbed with kennel pens on the back.

The men thought a pair of bloodhounds would make short work of finding those missing girls, but that proved not to be the case. There were two hounds in the back of that truck and they came out eager and yanking at their thick leather leads. Missus Tyler gave the bloodhound fella some clothes the girls had been wearing. You remember seeing a pink sweater and some sort of leggings.

Those bloodhounds dug their noses deep into those clothes, staining them with slobber. Once they got the scent in their heads, the dogs started baying around inside the barn like they’d gone nuts. But when that old boy tried to lead them outside, the hounds went to whining and looking back and forth. They sniffed and snorted around the packed dirt, kicking up little puffs of dust and hay.

The search went on all that day. The sheriff and his deputies led the way with the bloodhound fella, but the dogs never found nothing. Those girls vanished as if they were snatched from the sky. Wherever those two little girls got to or were taken to, their feet didn’t touch the ground getting there.

The search went on. You were out there most of the time, dodging copperheads and getting chewed by chiggers. As the days passed, folks yelled less often. They started to figure out that they were looking for bodies. Even for all the volunteers, probably a hundred folks by the second day, no one ever found so much as a single footprint.

After two weeks without finding a trace, the sheriff called off the search. The sheriff said wherever those girls might be, they weren’t in the woods. That’s when the talk around town changed. Folks started lamenting the poor dead girls instead of speaking about the missing children. Even the ones who figured the girls were kidnapped assumed they never lived long enough to see their eleventh birthdays.

With no more searching to do, the townsfolk had time to start figuring out what had happened. Somebody had to be guilty. That’s about the time a cloud of blame started to float around like a hatch of mayflies looking for somewhere to land.

The sheriff set aside plenty of time to find the murdering bastard, which is what it came down to in his mind. He drove out to the farm to have a talk with you, man to man as he called it. You told him everything you could remember about that afternoon, going over it again and again. He was satisfied with your answers by the time he drove off, but the sheriff wasn’t done asking questions.

Jamie Tyler was surprised when some of the townsfolk turned on him. You didn’t know why it would come as a surprise, but then again, Jamie never was as smart as he gave himself credit for.

The sheriff kept after Jamie, trying to find out what happened in the last hours of that afternoon. Jamie stuck to his story. The three boys went up to the house. It was him, Kurt Banks, and Billy Russell. No sir, he had shooed Gimpy Carlisle on home before that. Yessir, they drank some beer, two cans apiece. After drinking the beer, Kurt and Billy drove off in Billy’s truck. Then Jamie fell asleep on the porch glider. Yessir, the girls were playing in the barn the whole time. No sir, he didn’t go down to check on them.

When the blame finally did settle, most of it fell on Jamie Tyler. The general feeling in town was that if he had been minding those girls, none of this would have happened.

Looking back at it, you have to guess Jamie figured he was a golden boy, captain of the high school football team and all of that. Maybe he thought everyone in town would just forgive and forget. The townsfolk did forget, once it became easier than remembering, but that took most of a decade. Jamie Tyler was long gone by then. But in the hard days after those girls went missing, while the hurt was still fresh and vivid, no one was much for forgiving or forgetting.

Given the hateful things folks were saying, Jamie Tyler saw the error in his thinking. Absence was what was needed, and the Marines were happy to supply it. His pa drove him down to the enlistment office in Springfield. Jamie joined up using his mother’s maiden name and his pa signed the papers.

Those enlistment fellas in their shiny uniforms didn’t quibble over the fine details. They needed warm bodies for Vietnam. If a particular warm body had a past that needed burying, and maybe a name as well, that was okay with them. After all, his father signed for him.

James Hill learned how to be a Marine crawling through the mud and the bugs and the sand of Parris Island, South Carolina. Most of those brand-new marines rushed on home on leave as soon as they were done with their training. Private Hill didn’t bother. He spent two weeks in a cheap motel on the Carolina coast. Then he shipped out to Vietnam.

The rest of his pathetic little crew weren’t far behind him, slinking away from the sneers and snubs back home.

Kurt Banks waited for his draft number to come up. He didn’t have long to wait, not in sixty-seven. The army scooped him up soon enough. Like his hero Jamie, Kurt made it to Vietnam. He was killed his first week in country, standing in the wrong spot at the wrong time, not knowing which way to jump when the rockets started screaming in.

Billy Russell kept out of sight and started drinking real hard. After a few months of hiding, Billy vanished completely. No one in town ever saw him again.

Of the four boys who were on the Tyler farm that hot June afternoon, it was just you and Jamie Tyler left. And you were the only one left behind, still on your dead daddy’s land. Jamie had disappeared in a puff of smoke and reappeared in Southeast Asia, transformed into James Hill.

In the jungles and highlands of Vietnam, James Hill served out his thirteen-month tour, ending up a Lance Corporal. The guys in his squad nicknamed him Gung Ho Hill. He volunteered for every extra duty, every patrol. When his time was up, Corporal Hill volunteered for another tour of combat.

Sergeant Hill was a squad leader during his second tour. He was still known as Gung Ho Hill, but he was also known for being lucky. He spent twenty-six months in Vietnam, much of it in combat, and yet he was never wounded, not even a scratch. After his four years were up, the Marines sent him back home.

That homecoming was the damndest thing you’d ever seen. It was as if four years had thrown a blanket of amnesia over the whole damn town. James Hill came back from his soldiering and overnight he was the town hero. You’d swear he’d been washed in the blood of the lamb and sanctified. Washed in blood might be true, but whatever blood he washed in didn’t come from no animal.

It didn’t seem to matter what you remembered about James Hill. The town was bent on forgetting and forget they did. The past was washed clean, packed away, and that was that. James Hill became a deputy sheriff and you plowed your farm.

In the meantime, two decades have passed. James Hill is still the county sheriff. And he is still the town hero. You’re a bachelor farmer with a game leg, eking out a living from a farm that should have been let go years ago. You are no one’s idea of a hero.

Standing on the porch, you look out over the field. The empty furrows run back and forth down to the creek. The rising sun catches the turned earth, setting it to gleaming. It frosted last night, the first hard frost of October. That’s the signal that you need to go gather persimmons. You step off the porch, gather up a tote sack and a long hickory pole.

The trail that runs along the creek isn’t much used. There’s less folks living out here every year. The path is mostly just a deer run, overgrown here and there where it slips under the banks of the creek. It’s a thirty-minute hike from the farm. Out past the edge of your fields, the creek gouges a slot into low hills and woodland. The creek banks get steeper, showing fractured walls of cert and shale.

You come to a tiny side stream that falls to the creek, cutting a narrow trough in the crumbling wall. That spray of water is your marker. You climb the wall like a set of broken stairs, boots edging the rock, one hand clutching at a low branch that drapes down from overhead.

Pushing through the brush that guards the top of the rocky ledge, you walk under hickory and oak trees painted silver by the frost. The faint trail winds through a tangle of spicebush, pawpaw, and buckeye.

You walk through a short stretch of woods, forty jerky paces swinging your lame leg. Then the trunks of hickory and oak stop. Beyond the edge of the wood is a hidden grove of persimmon trees. The gnarled old fruit trees grow in a hollow scooped out of the layers of soft rock, rooted deep into a pocket of good bottomland loam.

There are maybe a dozen trees, rough-barked and scraggly. The leaves are half-ruined by the frost. They droop limp and ugly, like dog ears. Red-orange fruit hangs from the branches within easy reach of your hickory pole.

You’ve always had a taste for the pulpy fruit, ever since you were a boy. You’ve been picking these persimmons for years. You know this place, know every tree, the way the ground slants, and how the little creek cuts a furrow through the glade. The morning is frost-cold, and your breath hangs in the still air. But your mind runs back to another time when you stood in almost the very spot you stand now.

It was the dog-end of a hot June evening, twenty-one years ago. The cicadas were sawing through the gloaming of the day. Long shadows fell from the persimmon trees, turning the green tangle of pawpaw and buckeye to grey. Then you saw the rectangle of ground stripped bare of undergrowth.

No light reflected from the disturbed ground. It stood out black against the grey shadows, a void of darkness the size and shape of a kitchen table. Leaves were scattered over the wounded soil in unnatural clumps, catching the eye more than camouflaging.

You stood there as the light faded, staring at that piece of broken ground. The shouts of other searchers echoed through the gloaming, from down along the creek, from the woods on the far side of it. You did not call out to them, did not bring their booted feet running. You heard their voices moving upstream, as the search parties swept the creek banks and the darkening woods. You turned away then, away from that wounded ground, out from under the persimmon trees. Leaving it all behind, you followed the shouting voices.

A shaft of winter sun slants through the branches, catching your breath and transforming it into a silver cloud. The cloud drifts away through the branches of the persimmon trees. You wish those awful memories would drift away as well, but they won’t. Those images are anchored in your brain. It’s been two decades and more. You’re tired of keeping it all locked up in your head.

What will the townsfolk think when you tell them about this place? They won’t want to believe, not after all this time. They will turn their backs on you, call you a liar. But the seed will have been planted. Even bad seeds grow if you care for them.

A few of them will come out here and start digging. They will bring beers, say it’s all a joke. But what will they think when one of their shovels uncovers beetle-stripped bones in a shallow grave? The joke will be on them, but it won’t seem so funny now.

The others will crowd around the hole. The diggers will cast aside their shovels, removing the crumbling earth with shaking hands. Then they will find not one set of bones, but two. The remains are human, obviously human. The men hunching over that grave wish that they had not found this thing.

Fingers slide earth from bone, more careful now, more reverent. The diggers uncover enough to see the tableau unfold in the earth, see the thin girlish bones joined in a death embrace, skeletal arms intertwined, ribs fallen together.

And when someone’s trembling fingers lift a moldering keyfob from amongst those delicate remains, what then? They will pass it from hand to hand, hold it up to the light, wipe the earth from the fob, read out the engraved initials: JT, who is JT? Then memory will spark in the mind of one of the diggers. He will speak the name aloud, in a wondering voice, and the others will hear the name, shake their heads.

Damnation will surely fall on the boy James Hill used to be, but there is more than enough damnation to go around. Jamie Tyler was a monster long before he was a hero. A monster is dangerous, and you know there is more than one monster in this story. Are you sure you want the people of this town to understand the real story? The truth of a story can be dangerous, and not just for the listeners.

The persimmon grove is shining as sunlight slants through the frosty mist. You lean on your hickory pole and look up through the branches. Your breath comes in silver clouds. You push the long pole against a laden bough and set it to swaying. The red-orange persimmons fall through the silver-bright air. Some of them split open when they strike the ground. You gather the frost-sweetened fruit and place it in your tote sack.

Fini

You can find The McNeese Review here:

The McNeese Review

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