Chapter Twenty-six · Cutter
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CUTTER
The medical examiner’s preliminary came back on the ninth and it said cardiac arrhythmia.
No trauma. No defensive injuries. No forced entry, because there is no lock on a fab bay door in a fenced yard.
No sign of a struggle. A sixty-one-year-old man with high blood pressure and a family history, working alone at night in a shop he had worked alone in for twenty-two years, who sat down on a stool at some point after two in the morning and did not get up.
Sturgill called Grace with it himself, which he did not have to do.
“Let me say two things,” he said, on the speaker in the yard office.
“One, that’s preliminary, and preliminary means the state has ruled out the obvious and nothing else.
Two, I’ve asked for a full toxicology panel and the state has told me it is a hundred and ten days out and that they see no indication for expedite. ”
“On what grounds did you ask?” Grace said.
“On the grounds that I don’t like it,” Sturgill said. “Which is not a legal standard, ma’am, and the fella in Richmond told me so, politely, twice.”
Grace wrote something down.
“Deputy, I mean to say a thing to you as a lawyer and not as anybody’s counsel,” she said.
“You are twenty-nine years old and you are about to spend a great deal of what you’ve got on a case that a hundred people will tell you is a heart attack.
If you do that, do it on paper. Every request, every refusal, in writing, with a date on it.
Not because anybody’s lying to you. Because in four months you are going to need to prove that you asked. ”
There was a pause on that line.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sturgill said. “I already started a file on the seventh.”
Grace put her pen down and looked at the phone for a second, and then at us.
“All right,” she said. “Then that’s one more of us.”
They buried him on the twelfth at Little Bethel, in the section his wife is in, forty feet from Pike Danner.
I will say that part again because it did something to every man in this club that day and none of us talked about it. Forty feet. You can stand at Hollis Teague’s grave and read HE WROTE IT DOWN on Pike’s stone without moving your head.
I have been to a great many funerals. I have carried at seven of them. I want to set down what that one was, because I have never seen anything like it and I do not expect to again.
The church holds a hundred and forty. There were four hundred people there.
They came from the county and from Botetourt and from Rockbridge and out of Roanoke, and half of them had never been in that church in their lives.
The Ruritans directed parking in the field across the road.
The volunteer fire department at Wilkes Ford brought Engine 2 and parked it at the gate with the flag hung off the ladder, which is a thing they do for one of their own, and Hollis Teague was never a fireman.
Bobby Sowder did it anyway, and when somebody asked him about it he said, “He welded that engine’s front bumper in 2011 and wouldn’t take a dime,” and that was the end of the discussion.
Two men from the state highway department came in their uniforms. The county school superintendent came, because Hollis had built the bleacher rails at the elementary school.
A man drove three hours from Bristol with a card in his pocket and stood in the back and cried, and it took me until the graveside to work out that he was one of the fellas from the GED class, the truck driver, the one with the kid’s picture, and I do not know to this day how he heard.
Sixteen Copperheads in cuts, in the fourth and fifth rows, because the family sat in the first three, and because Diesel had gone to Charity Teague on the ninth and asked her permission to come at all, in her kitchen, with his hat in his hands, and had told her plainly that if the club’s being there would bring anything down on her he would keep every man home and nobody would ever think less of her for it.
She told him her father worked in that yard for better than twenty years and that she would like the fourth and fifth rows filled.
Trip Odom sat at the end of the fifth row and was the only man in this club who cried where people could see him, and he is twenty-three and has a hole in his chest from July, and nobody said one word to him about it then or since.
Hollis’s daughter is named Charity, which is a name you do not hear anymore. Thirty-one years old. She has her father’s jaw and both of her own eyes and she stood at the front of that church with a two-year-old on her hip and shook four hundred hands.
Diesel had told the club, in the chapel, the night before: *Nobody wears anything but the cut. Nobody says one word to that girl about anything but her daddy. And if any man says the word Kesterly inside that churchyard I will personally walk him to his truck.*
Nobody said it. Four hundred people, and everybody in that churchyard knew, and not one soul said it, and I have thought since that this is the single most characteristic thing about the place I am from: an entire county can know a thing exactly and hold it, all day, out of respect, and then go home and say it in their kitchens.
Preacher Combs did the service and did it plain.
Hollis was not a churchgoing man and the preacher did not pretend otherwise, which I respected.
He read the Twenty-third and he read from Ecclesiastes about the work of a man’s hands, and then he said the thing that broke that room, which was that this county was going to be driving across Hollis Teague’s welds for the next fifty years without ever once thinking about him, and that this is what a good life looks like from the outside, which is like nothing at all.
Then Charity got up.
She had a piece of paper and she did not use it.
“My daddy had one eye and eleven fingers’ worth of scars and he could not spell,” she said.
“He got out of school in the tenth grade. He was the smartest man I ever met in my life and I have got a bachelor’s degree.
” She shifted the baby. “In August he called me on a Sunday and asked me was the mortgage all right. He’d never asked me that in his life.
And I said we were fine, because we’re not fine, and he said all right, and then he said, *Charity, if anybody ever comes around asking about your daddy’s work, you tell them to come see me and you shut the door. *”
The church made a sound.
“I don’t know what that means,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it for five days.
I know there’s men in this building that do.
” She looked out over that room and she found the fourth and fifth rows and she looked right at us, at all sixteen of us at once, and four hundred people watched her do it.
“I’m not asking. I don’t want to know today.
But I want whoever knows to hear me say in this church that my father did not do one dishonest thing in sixty-one years, and if it turns out that’s what killed him, then I would like somebody to have the decency to tell me that to my face someday, and not let me find it in a newspaper. ”
Grace Whitmore, sitting on the aisle in the sixth row, put her hand over her mouth.
Charity sat down. Nobody in that church moved for about six seconds.
At the graveside the flag detail put the flowers on and Dutch Voyles was walked out to the front by two younger men because he had insisted on being there and had not slept in three days.
And then the fab bay crew came up.
Denny and Cody, the two apprentices, nineteen and twenty-two years old, in dress shirts that did not fit them, and they had brought something and had not told anybody they were bringing it.
It was a plate. Aluminum, about twelve inches, and they had cut it and finished it themselves in that bay over two nights, and welded a bead across the bottom edge that was the exact weld he taught them, and they had ground the face and stamped it by hand.
The letters were not straight. The stamping set walked on them the way it does when a boy is doing it by hand at eleven o’clock at night in a bay where a man died five days ago.
It said: HE WOULDN’T DO IT.
They set it against the stone and stood back, and Cody, who is nineteen, said to nobody in particular, “He told us in May. He come out of the bay and told us both what a fella asked him and what he said back, and he made us say it back to him so we’d remember it if we ever got asked.”
Rook Walsh turned his whole body away from that grave and stood facing the pines for about a minute.
Because that is the piece nobody had.
Hollis Teague told two apprentice boys in May, in his own bay, ten minutes after a stranger walked out of it, and made them repeat it back to him so they would have it right.
He did not tell me. He did not tell Diesel.
He did not tell Grace Whitmore when she took his statement in August and asked him over and over whether anybody else knew.
I have gone back and forth on why for a good while and I have landed where I expect to stay, which is that he did not consider it worth reporting in May because in May he thought saying no was the end of it, and that by the time he understood it was not, telling two teenagers had turned from a habit into a will.
Grace got their statements the following Tuesday, both of them, separately, on video, with their mothers present.
They matched to the word. Nineteen and twenty-two years old and they had been carrying the only clean corroboration in this entire case around in their heads all summer, because an old man asked them to remember something.
Teal was standing at the back of the crowd by the fence. I watched him take out a notebook at the sight of that plate and then put it back in his pocket without writing anything, and stand there for the rest of it with his arms hanging.
The women fed four hundred people in the churchyard afterward, which is what happens, out of the backs of cars, on folding tables under the maples, for three hours.
Charlene brought the jar from the store, emptied, and started it over with Charity Teague’s name on it, and nobody had to be asked twice, and I do not know what was in it by dark and I know it was not enough and I know it mattered anyway.
Sienna came at two, off shift, in a black dress I had never seen, and she went straight to Charity Teague and did not come near me for forty minutes, which was right.
I watched her sit on the church steps with that girl and the two-year-old and talk about nothing at all.
The baby got hold of her sunglasses and she let him have them.
At one point Charity laughed, once, and put her hand over her own mouth like she had done something wrong, and Sienna said something to her and she stopped doing that.
When she finally came over I was at the fence with a plate of food I had not touched.
“Eat that,” she said.
“I will.”
“You won’t.” She took it out of my hand and gave it to Scout, who ate it. Then she stood beside me and looked at the cemetery. “Cutter. There’s a thing I’ve got to tell you and this is the wrong day and there is not going to be a right one.”
Something in the way she said it turned my stomach over.
“Say it.”
“When I worked him.” She kept her eyes on the stones. “Before I called it. I did the exam I always do, all the way through, because that’s the job and because there was a witness present and because it turns out I’ve spent eleven years building habits for exactly one day I never expected to have.”
“Sienna.”
“His pupils were pinpoint,” she said.
The churchyard went on around us, four hundred people and paper plates and children in the grass.
“Say what that means.”
“It means what it means every other time I see it, which is about forty times a year, and every single one of those times I have written the same four words in the same box on the same form.”
“Sienna, he was sixty-one and he had blood pressure and he was working nights.”
“Yes. And a man with an arrhythmia does not have pinpoint pupils, Cutter. Those are two different findings and they do not go together, and the man who wrote that preliminary never saw the pupils, because by the time a body gets to Roanoke that finding is gone.”
She turned and looked at me. “It means I have put it in my run report, in that language, in the objective findings, dated and signed and filed with the county on the seventh. And it means Sturgill has already read it, and it means the state’s tox panel is a hundred and ten days out with no expedite. ”
I stood at that fence and looked out at a grave with an aluminum plate leaned against it that said HE WOULDN’T DO IT.
“They used it on him,” I said.
“I can’t say that. I’m not allowed to say that and I’m not going to say it, and if you ever quote me saying it I’ll deny it and I’ll be right to.
” Her voice was absolutely steady and her hands were not.
“What I can say is what I wrote down, which is what I saw, and I saw it before I knew whose bay I was standing in.”