Chapter 34
Nothing in this book is a coincidence, or everything is a coincidence. The boy leading Fiacre down the stairs is from Tisdale, Missouri, a snarl of a town seventeen miles southeast of Blue Eye and thirty seven miles northeast of Berryville. Clara Jane Smith now Staley, who is now—right now!—in Berryville receiving a hug from Mrs. Heartbreak, is originally from Tisdale.
[If you think this is more than a coincidence cue in some scary organ music.]
Organ music is a good thing to cue in right now—can you hear it?—because the boy from Tisdale is Eveninside’s organ player, although maybe organ player isn’t quite what he is; he has never had a music lesson and he doesn’t play so much as he blitzkriegs sheet music. He has certainly never played a thing that folks in Tisdale heard before he started playing it—and they never ever wanted to hear what he played a second time.
One day the boy started to peck at his Uncle Delta Sartell’s electric keyboard; a week later he was whacking out Boellmann’s Toccata. I guess he is a savant.
What the boy played was church music. Church music is more or less okay in Tisdale as long as the tune in question sounds like Barber Shop Quartet singing, or something Wynonna Judd might twang to death after a debauched night and a shame glutted morning. But the boy played ‘ungodly church music’, ‘music to murder hogs by’ according to Uncle Sartell, who nervously snatched the keyboard away from the boy after hearing him play the
Suite Gothique. “You’re scaring me, boy,” Sartell told him. “You’re reminding me of Clara Jane.”
The boy, whose name is Lawrence Biggs, is at least twenty years younger than Clara Jane, and although he has never met her, he knows her story very well, and he knows what remains of her extended family since they still live in Tisdale. What remains of them.
Like the boy, Clara Jane is also a savant, probably Tisdale’s first savant as a matter of fact, which is probably why folks in town get the willies over any kind of specialness, specialness not being abundant in any local sense, whether it takes the boy’s ghostly form of hog killing music, or is Clara Jane’s unrequited killing of kin which hardly ever involved music at all unless you’re a John Cage fan and see the point and counterpoint of gags, yelps, groans, weeps, whines, grinds, crackle crackle, and the suck splat sounds of person centered mayhem, to paraphrase Carl Rogers, as music.
Only 47% of the people who live in the Ozarks—that would include Tisdale and Blue Eye, Berryville and Eureka Springs—are born and bred there, stay there, and live there now; the ‘Others’ are Yankees like John and Mrs. Heartbreak or Appalachian American Look-a-Likes from adjacent southern states or the regrettable Texas. These ‘Others’ have no idea what the large minority that surrounds them, engulfs them, cheats them, resents them, and laughs at them is up to (except for the surrounding, engulfing, cheating, resenting, and laughing parts. They get that.).
But there is only so much moonlight and magnolia, so much Shepherd of the Hills hoodoo a person can swallow before they’re forced to slap themselves sentient and slink back to the Continental United States from whence they came, or become Pinball Wizards: deaf, dumb, and blind. Welcome to The Natural State!
And so it came to pass, as Joseph Smith began 926 sentences in the
Book of Mormon, that 53% of Tisdale’s population was completely unaware that residents were disappearing at the rate of about one a week, while the other 47%, the ‘Naturals’, knew that folks were disappearing at a higher than average clip, but reserved judgment because the disappeared weren’t missed all that much. Their absence, in fact and not to put too fine a point on it, enhanced property values and improved Tisdale’s admittedly dismal but overall quality of life. So it was all good. More or less. Depending on your view of such matters. Anyway:
They—the disappeared, the absent, the here today gone tomorrow—the departed, had in common one thing; they were blood bound to Little Clara Rinker, now Clara Jane Smith Staley: cousins, uncles, a brother, and Peyton Knobsgobble, not a blood relative but a partner in the methamphetamine sale and distribution business with Ray Bob’s brother and first cousin.
It wasn’t long after Peyton, Jimmy Joe, and Joe Jimmy disappeared that they were followed by Jay Jay Rinker and then by Charles Ray, Ray Jay, Jay Ray, and Ray Charles Rinker (the Appalachian American Ray Charles, not the African American Ray Charles). If you’re counting, that’s eight little Rinkers gone to ground (plus one Knobsgobble).
It was only when Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, the wife of Billy R. Postwhistle and the sister of Bobby Ray Rinker disappeared, that the Rinker family started to talk about the suddenly departed. Bobbie Rae was the barmaid at Billy Rs' Tisdale Tap and, when she didn’t show up for work as scheduled and Billy R. Postwhistle didn’t know “where the expletive deleted” was, all the Rinkers began looking over their shoulders and jumping at the sound of cat scratches.
The ‘Others’ in town, that lamentable pack of pansies and over-educated elites from the outside, continued to be oblivious to the dwindling number of Rinkers, and except for noting the pleasurable decrease in high speed methamphetamine fueled 4x4 traffic on the single road through town, kept to themselves and their Fellow NPR listening Travelers. Nothing bothered them at all…except for that horrible smell!
On occasional basis the foul odors of industrial chicken production, processing, packaging and transporting abated through some climatic miracle; perhaps the wind shifts a degree or two, the temperature pauses between degrees, and the barometric pressure takes a dose of Prozac and napped for a while.
The confluence of such happenings will, for an hour, a weekend, ameliorate the habitual stinkyness of The Natural State, that Land of Opportunity, long enough for Realtors to tour visiting Others about the place—a Window into the Land of Opportunity-to laud its beauty, celebrate its low property taxes, to encourage the myth that its poverty is mere quaintness, and to get the Others to sign on the dotted line.
“What are you doing this weekend?” Realtor One asks.
“Wal, if the wind dies down I guess I’ll go trawlin’ for Suckers,” says Realtor Two.
If at closing the wind has shifted and the Other sniffs and becomes alarmed, be not surprised if the Realtor feigns befuddlement:
“Smell? I don’t smell anything… here just sign there… and there… and…”
After a while the Others become about as indifferent to the faint smell of carcass permeating the environment as are the Natives. Once in, oh say, a Blue Moon, an Other who is teetering between sentience and Pinball Wizardry might sniff and ask, “What’s that smell!!?”
To which Natives have been trained to invariably reply, “It smells like money!”
This from a guy who makes twelve bucks an hour gutting chickens on a 3rd shift.
But the air had become intolerably meaty in Tisdale, and let’s says it was on Robert E. Lee’s birthday, 1996, just to pick a day that it was finally acknowledged. Several Natives had gathered outside the door of Billy R's Tisdale Tap, preparing to go in to celebrate the General’s birthday, when Dee Dee Rinker, exclaimed, against all rules of training and eleven years of indoctrination, “What’s that smell!!?”
“It smells like money,” replied a chorus of Natives.
“No it doesn’t!” shouted Dee Dee, pointing. “It smells like Bobbie Rae Postwhistle! There she is!”
And there was Bobbie Rae, in plain sight, crucified on the hood of an abandoned 1976 school bus parked across the street from The Tap, the bus currently serving—well, current to mean for the last eleven years—as the home of the Prekel Beantop family. Mrs. Postwhistle’s body was partially obscured by a small flock of buzzards which, sensing the approaching crowd, lifted off and flew away in a crabby, buzzardly manner, leaving the body in plainer view.
“Yep, that’s the wife,” said Billy R. Postwhistle. “I guess somebody ort should call the High Sheriff.”
The preceding violent passages are unfortunate, and you have my apologies for this seeming violation of the NSVSL rule. But it is, frankly, impossible to say much about the Ozarks without at least a
soupcon of skullduggery. Bad dentistry and Wal-Mart can only take you so far, literature wise. In any case, please be advised that the next two paragraphs are a bit graphic.
It took the sheriff’s deputies almost four hours to get Bobbie Rae’s remains off the hood of that old school bus. She had been thoroughly Super Glued to the sheet metal and, because the glue had hardened into an almost glass-like substance during the five days the sheriff estimated the body had reposed there, his deputies had had to chip, chip, chip-away before they could stand her up, and then put her down and into a waiting ambulance.
Although it would be five days before they determined a cause of death—Bobbie Rae had had the living delights scared out of her—the Sheriff’s Department, and then the Missouri State Crime Investigation Unit with back-up support from the Tisdale Fire Department, wasted no time in locating the remains of the missing eight Rinkers and the unfortunate Peyton Knobsgobber.
They found Jimmy Joe Rinker’s body hanging by the neck from the town’s water tower. Joe Jimmy’s body was lashed (tidily) to the ‘Arkansas 13 miles’ sign on the south side of town. His feet and hands were missing, causing investigators to surmise that he hadn’t tried to walk out of town, or hitchhike. That left only foul play or, so at least, they concluded.
Most of Jay Jay Rinker was found leaning up against the wall of the Antioch Primitive Holiness Tabernacle on Main Street, Charles Ray was in the hog roaster in City Park, Ray Jay was going up and down on the elementary school’s teeter totter, Jay Ray was sitting in the backseat of the town’s squad car, and Ray Charles Rinker slept the big sleep on a lime green velour couch on Mrs. Ajax Freeway’s porch.
The time between the first death—that would be Jimmy Joe Rinker, and the last death—Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, was eleven weeks. You may be wondering how it is possible for ten corpses to hide in plain sight for so long. How, you may ask, was it possible for residents not to see a moldering corpse tied to one of the town’s two traffic signs? Or, how about that crazy guy Ray Jay, going up and down on the teeter totter? Didn’t the kids out on recess wonder about him as he bobbled up, down, up?
Obviously, alls ya’alls don’t get off the main roads much. You haven’t tried to get an Ozark based town council to enforce building codes or cut its grass, those amber waves of weeds thriving along all its public byways. Nor have you experienced the collective blindness of the Natives as their towns become like the Sears and Roebuck couch painting Aunt Tillie bought in 1963; no one has really looked at it since the Kennedy assassination.
The fact is that dead bodies could positively festoon the streets of Berryville or Blue Eye or Green Forest Arkansas—to name just three—and no one would notice. If an Other pointed it out, the Natives would just resent it. No kidding: take a look around; be especially tuned into groups of buzzards; you never know what you might see if you look closely enough.
When folks got around to telling fourteen year old Clara Jane of the deaths of her eight relatives, of a close business associate of theirs, and of a neighbor, the barmaid Bobbie Rae Postwhistle, she was remarkably dry-eyed. No one suspected that the small statured teenager had had anything to do with the killings, but everyone who talked to her commented on the cold chill that ran down their spines.
“Sumpin’ ain’t right about that gal,” everyone said. “When she looks at me I hear music to kill hogs by!”
When Billy R. Postwhistle began looking around for a replacement wife for the now deceased Bobbie Ray Postwhistle, he naturally sized up 14 year old Clara Jane.
“Dang,” he said, licking his lips.
And therein lay the solution to the eleven murders—Billy R. soon joined the eight Rinkers, Peyton Knobsgobber, and the late Mrs. Postwhistle; Clara Jane had plans opposed to those of her close and extended family that did not include the mailing of those Ozark inspired greetings cards such as ‘Happy Birthday, dear Uncle Dad!’ or ‘Merry Christmas Brother Cousin Otis!”
Clara Jane’s plans also excluded early marriage to the likes of Billy R. She, like so many other young people from small Ozark towns, hoped to become a beautician—Sheer Delight!—or to move away to Branson for a job in the Hospitality Industry—“do you want fries with that?” Certainly then, Billy Rs' lusts, and his and hopefulness for free labor had to be thwarted.
Billy R’s intentions toward Clara Jane were well known in Tisdale. He discussed his options in comprehensive detail with Tap regulars—should he wait until she was 15?—should he let her finish the 9th grade?—but ultimately concluded that neither was important and loudly announced his intentions to proceed post haste.
“Ain’t you scared of her, Billy R?” folks asked. “I hear hog murdering music when she walks by.”
“She’ll be squealing like a little piggy this time next week,” he said, with a sly grin. “That’s the only music you’ll be hearing.”
Billy R. was thwarted by 5,000 volts from an arc welder; his remains were stored in the Out of Town mailbox in front of the post office. He would have remained there indefinitely except that Billy R. was the single source of beer in Tisdale and, when he failed to open at 7:30 AM for Bertha E. Wheatley, an Episcopalian Other and problem drinker, or again at 8:45 AM for Hymer E. Crull, a Native and Tisdale’s Designated Town Drunk (DTD), a hue and cry was sounded and the search began.
By now, both Natives and Others shared whispers about Clara Jane, and more than one Tisdale resident had spoken to the High Sheriff about the spooky girl.
“We’ll keep an eye on her,” he said. “But if she’s done it, she done it good. We ain’t got no proof.”
To the Clara Jane’s satisfaction, there was a precipitous drop off in proposals, regular or otherwise. She began also to grow in self-awareness and recognized that she possessed talents that were not only highly specialized, but in short supply as well. Perhaps there were persons outside Tisdale of low moral character who would not be missed if they became Departed? Perhaps there were persons willing to pay for the pleasure of not missing someone?
Please buy
Coffee with John Heartbreak: A Mostly Truth Story of Berryville, Arkansas, to learn if such a supposition is true.
Thus, when nearly twenty years later the boy Lawrence Biggs started playing Boellmann, and then that old Bach goody in
D Minor, folks in Tisdale began having trouble sleeping at night. When they turned corners they stopped first and peered around them first before proceeding, and took to checking the water tower for swinging men. Every note Lawrence played stirred up a Clara Jane memory. Folks got the Chronic Willies so bad they put new locks on the doublewide.
When news of the new Eveningside Ministry in nearby Blue Eye got to be common knowledge, Roberta Yates, a member of the Living Word Full Gospel Pentecostal Whole Truth and Full Deal Church of Revelation reported a vision of Lawrence playing his music there for Jake and Lulu Cooker. Not surprisingly, Mrs. Yates’ vision was widely accepted as a Command from God, and Red Yates, husband of Roberta, was designated to haul Lawrence Biggs over to Eveningside and drop him off there. The Tisdale town council providently gave Red $50 to cover expenses, which worked out to more than $1 a mile, high cotton indeed.
Lawrence was delighted to have a real organ to play, albeit electric rather than pipe, and auditioned for Eveningside’s Music Minister Dr. Randy Starr by playing Bach’s Trio Sonata, 3rd movement.
Dr. Starr was worried about the Communist music he was hearing but, recognizing that Lawrence was a savant and not a true musician, played a recording of ‘
The Ballad of Jesus and John Birch’ by the Bob Jones University Glee Club and asked Lawrence if he could replicate it. Of course he could; Eveningside offered Lawrence a music internship providing free room and board; Red Yates and the Tisdale town council accepted the offer on Lawrence’s behalf.
It is not the nature of savants to have strong feelings about their savanting activities. Like Clara Jane before him, it was enough that Lawrence could do a thing that was inshort supply; he just wanted to do it. Clara was able to kill with ease and impunity; Lawrence could play anything on the organ, easily and with the same impunity.
And so:
As the boy and Fiacre head down the stairs, he tells Fiacre that his name is Lawrence Biggs, “but everybody calls me Little Biggs ‘cause my sister Roberta is Big Biggs and she ain’t the small one in the family.”
Fiacre nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Little Biggs it is.”
He liked Little Biggs and how unafraid the boy with the Justin Bieber haircut appeared when they had nearly collided outside the Bakker residence near the staircase door. Fiacre didn’t know that the boy was a savant, perhaps an idiot savant, and assumed that the boy, like Fiacre himself, operated mostly by instinct and grace and wouldn’t care anymore than Fiacre did that Lulu Cooker was lying in a deep fearful swoon on the mobile home grade carpet in Jake Cooker’s boudoir.
After all, Fiacre thought, what had Lori ever done for Little Biggs or, for that matter, what had Reverend Jake Cooker ever done for Little Biggs except rob him of his precious teenage time and scare the ever-loving shineola out of him with lies about end times?
Fiacre and Little Biggs did share the opinion that most of what bad could happen to Lulu had already happened. Surely her chance meeting with the harmless Time Traveler Fiacre was a small thing against the bigger, tragic, Whoop Dee Doo of marriage to a 70 year old time share salesman who wore high heels and owed the IRS $6,000,000.
Fiacre was sure that Lulu would snap out of her current swoon and, if Little Biggs came to know that Facre was the cause of about Lulu’s current circumstances, well he wouldn’t think it amounted to much. After all, Little Biggs had, coincidentally or not, grown up in snarling Tisdale in the shadow of Clara Rinker now Clara Jane Smith Staley and was no stranger to life in the Lower Depths.
“Where does this stairway lead, Little Biggs?” asked Fiacre. “Will I find the Warrior Queen at the bottom of it?”
“It goes down to the Grand Hall.”
“Grand Hall?”
“Yeah. It’s just a TV studio with some stores around it,” Little Biggs reported. “There’s the Jonah & The Whale Café, the Lulu Travel Shoppe, Blanche Chapel which Pastor Cooker named after his mom, some kind of grocery store and a bookstore, a sewing shop, and a place where they sell houses and condos and stuff.”
Fiacre and the boy reached the second floor. He could see the bottom of the stairs, one flight down, and felt a shiver of anticipation for the fun he expected to have once he got there. He wanted to give Heartbreak his note of instruction, and then sit back and watch it all unfold.
“What’s the Warrior Queen?” Little Biggs asked. He was at the bottom of the stairway, looking upwards toward the slower moving Fiacre.
“The Warrior Queen is a
who, not a what,” he answered. “She is here to Grand Fandango the Reverend Cooker and seek the return of $6,000,000.”
“Cool. Can I help?”
“I don’t see why not,” Fiacre said with a smile. “Why don’t you open the door?”
