For NaNoWriMo (at last): The Field of Blood, part 1

Well, @freewritehouse, @mariannewest, @ntowl, and fellow Wrimos, here I am, and it is still November -- I crossed the 50,000-word threshold about twenty minutes ago, completing an entirely new novel featuring Captain Hamilton at 50,475 words!

Yet for me, this is a bit more than a fun project. As some of you know, I flip some of my work to Amazon -- so, in three months, I have found myself with a trilogy: Black, White and RED All Over, already on Amazon The Posture of Innocence, latest post here and The Field of Blood. The latter has overrun the second one and displaced what should have been third: Will the Real Christians of Lofton County PLEASE Stand Up? From a creativity perspective, this is all very exciting. It is also mentally challenging and in terms of publication, quite unwieldy, since even with posting twice a day most days, The Posture of Innocence is still only 30 days deep and halfway posted up!

SO: I chose to just sit down and get The Field of Blood all done in a total of 19 focused spurts in 21 days, and THEN put it on Steemit, between now and the end of November. This will bring my post count up to around four per day, with The Posture of Innocence rolling through the freewrites, and The Field of Blood totally finished and just coming through as it comes through.

AND SO, without further ado: The Field of Blood, part 1, written Nov. 1 (and needing a dividing graphic):

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It had to be the strangest beginning to the investigation of an apparent suicide that had ever happened, at least as far as a country town police captain from Virginia had ever heard – had ever heard after a brilliant career as an Army major with 23 years of experience in both Special Forces and JAG before coming home to his country town.

Decades of old maps, and three deputy sheriffs down on the cold ground with tape measures, the body just swinging in the chilly evening wind, unattended, the scene not cordoned off, and the possibility of anybody just walking up and removing whatever evidence there may have been.

Ironwood Hamilton, captain of police in Tinyville, VA, could only do so much with his staff of two and the nature of things in his department – he and his faithful lieutenant Patrick O'Reilly had been providing what security there was need of at the Tinyville end of the Lofton County Harvest Festival, because county didn't have enough people again and called them up.

The county sheriff's department hadn't had enough people because it had been heavily taxed covering for shortfalls in the town of Littleburg, Minipolis, Shortport, and Smallwood since the Gilligan House Burning … and the shortfalls had happened because a large number of those officers in those towns and in Big Loft, the county seat and only true city, had been lost after they had overreacted to the new Black newspaper in the county, the Lofton County Free Voice.

Or, looked at from the historical view of Virginia law enforcement, maybe they hadn't overreacted … it would have been a problem either way once the Free Voice's Freedom of Information Act had wrung out all the information on how Black citizens of the town and county had been abused in the last ten years, all to get the new Pendleton Prison nice and full.

Problem was, the Black men of the county who worked in and backed the Free Voice had decided they weren't going to have it, and set a trap for the rogue officers moonlighting – at least that was the story – as KKK for the weekend at the Gilligan House. The weekend race warriors had burned down the historic building, thinking the people from the Free Voice were reviewing the information they had demanded – but the trap caught up all of them, with more than 40 officers killed.

And who had bucked the historical trend and given the official cover to the Black men defending their history and right to know what was being done to their community?

That same Ironwood Hamilton and his faithful lieutenant, Patrick O'Reilly, with assistance from the captain's cousin in Big Loft, Captain Henry F. Lee of the Big Loft police department.

Captain Lee had discovered where a lot of the rot back of the 10 years of data the Lofton County Free Voice began – with his own police commissioner, Orton Thomas. Commissioner Thomas had worked in conjunction with Captain Braxton Beauregard Bragg of Littleburg to organize the burning of the Gilligan House in order to keep the Free Voice from being able to understand and put out all that damning information … and it was truly damning, a clear record of abuse that showed clear evidence of racial profiling as a basis of corrupt policing for profit.

Big Loft's police department had been robust enough to afford to lose 25-30 officers at once; the city could take the strain. In Tinyville, Captain Hamilton had come home and culled the department the instant he realized what had been going on – from five men down to two, but the two-men department was taking the strain. Not that much went on in Tinyville, after all, now that abusing 28 percent of the town's citizens was not what kept the department busy.

However, the other small town police departments hadn't planned and couldn't take the strain – so they had pretty much been destroyed by their officers' participation in the Gilligan House Burning. Captain Angler, 67 years old, had been robbed of his dreams of retirement, now being alone in Smallwood's department – but, at least Smallwood had a captain, and one who knew the procedural sides of law enforcement. Littleburg had no one left. Minipolis and Shortport were each down to one lieutenant hastily made captain.

Everybody in that circle blamed Captain Hamilton of Tinyville, since their denial of their inferiority to the intelligent Black men who had trapped them at the Gilligan House kept them from seeing the reality of the matter. That was expected, of course, and planned for, to keep down reprisals. Captain Hamilton was White, and the great-great-great-grandchild of Robert E. Lee – so, nobody was going to directly bother him, for history's sake, and because the mild-mannered man from Special Forces turned police officer had a long record of not being the man to mess with.

Which brings the thing back to the old maps and tape measures – and the actual arrival of Captain Angler's bosom friend, county sheriff John Nottingham. Captain Hamilton restrained a laugh. So, that's what it was all about …

Captain Angler and Sheriff Nottingham were old White men completely unreconstructed by the civil rights movement – but they had largely steered clear of the newfangled corruption that had made their younger colleagues rich, because they knew it couldn't be sustained. Thus, county had only lost 10 men as part of the Gilligan House Burning, and Captain Angler had kept the cadets he knew from the local police academy from being there as well. They realized, the instant the Lofton County Free Voice arrived as it had, that the tide in the county had turned. Black people were tired, and someone or something had provided a catalyst for them to start fighting back and building again.

Although Captain Angler and Sheriff Nottingham were unreconstructed, they understood what happened when Black people got tired, and they lived in the same fears their ancestors who understood it had lived in, that fear that had driven all the crimes against humanity that slave owners and their post-war planter heirs, and the society who supported and admired such men, had practiced to keep Black people afraid and disorganized.

However, the means and the mechanisms had passed from Captain Angler and Sheriff Nottingham for the time being, and they knew it – the Black people in Lofton County had seized the new technologies and decentralized ways of putting forth information, and they were up on everything that could be done legally and by force to defend themselves and expand their agenda. So far as the present was concerned, the only thing to do was to back up and retrench and wait … the two men still could nourish the hate in the heart of the generation of their grandsons if they could just live long enough to get it done … 70 was the new 60, after all.

But what Captain Angler and Sheriff Nottingham couldn't have in the present climate was the kind of thing Captain Lee had pulled off in Big Loft – the linking of a case 25 years ago to the mess ten years ago. The generational complicity in making chattel of Lofton County's Black citizens when not just destroying them for hatred – the Lofton County Free Voice had pulled up all the data on the modern end, and Captain Lee had planted the flag of exposure 15 years back of that. The Soames case – John Soames had been killed because he opposed the idea of a private prison, and was a financier with good financial reasoning that would have messed up investment – so, the ten-year window had become a 25-year window. That was getting to be far too close for comfort for the oldest law men in the county.

Still, Sheriff Nottingham didn't worry about Captain Lee. He worried about Ironwood Hamilton in Tinyville, who knew how the small town and the rural areas were … and was 45, so old enough to remember things past that 25-year mark. Certainly, he had been away for almost three decades in West Point, but he had that terrible combination of being incredibly personable, incredibly observant, and incredibly masterful of data in the field. What he didn't know, he was constantly finding out, and people wanted to tell him.

Just how worried was Sheriff Nottingham? He showed up at the scene of an apparent suicide because he knew what it was before that suicide had happened. Need data? He had brought maps back to the birthing of Tinyville all the way back in 1894, while Major Lofton, the younger and profoundly longer-lived of the two Lofton brothers for whom the county was named, was still alive, and still holding most of the land that would be made into Lofton County in 1915.

The tape measures? A question of inches would determine whether the apparent suicide was in Lofton County proper or inside Tinyville – and Sheriff Nottingham wanted and needed this apparent suicide to be in his jurisdiction, not Captain Hamilton's.

The problem was that Tinyville, tiny as it still was, was immense compared to what it had been in 1894, and was still growing into the countryside – it had been redrawn twice in the 2000s, its boundaries pushed by careful development plans and the money to carry them out. That growth and the money behind it was what had led the city council to ask for Major Hamilton to come on home and be police captain after the accidental death of Captain Sidney – those who knew Major Hamilton knew he would clean up and thus get the town positioned for future development.

The leadership of Tinyville, like many forward-thinking Southerners, had moved on and put an end to lamenting a cause lost 150 years earlier. There was a new cause on the horizon: connectivity meant that a properly positioned small town could lure those workers in the new economy – and their money – who wanted a slower pace of life when they were ready to raise their families. Yet that same connectivity meant that one angry Black or Latino person could ruin the reputation Tinyville was trying to build around the world in a matter of seconds – and their communities together comprised 32 percent of the whole town. A third of the town, angry over a police incident, could wreck Tinyville's chances at achieving the vision its leaders saw – it just wasn't worth it any more.

So, Tinyville's leadership backed Captain Hamilton, who was slowly being accepted by all aspects of the town not still mourning that Lost Cause, to the hilt. He could do what he wanted, and he did – meaning the way he investigated matters was going to be totally different from the way Sheriff Nottingham would have liked everybody across the county to investigate things. Apparent suicide? Let it be where it hung. Black person killed by hanging? Oh well. Trees in Lofton County had been bearing strange fruit for centuries – let that be where it hung too. Procedures? Investigations? Waste of time at best, might stir up some stuff that the sheriff didn't need to be stirred up at worst, especially since the Lofton County Free Voice was on the scene every time a White person sneezed in a Black person's direction …

Which is why two deputies were fumbling with maps, and the sheriff himself -- with all the aches, pains, and creaks a large man who ate whatever and whenever he wanted would have at the age of 66 – was on the ground with another deputy using a tape measure when Captain Hamilton walked up.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said, and startled everyone. “You know, there's a body over there in that tree, 20 yards to our left.”

If looks could kill … Sheriff Nottingham looked up into Captain Hamilton's smiling face with enough venom to drop the average man. Captain Hamilton never even bothered to dim his smile.

“That must be some powerful evidence down there,” he said, and looked at one of the deputies' maps. “Or is it the county line you are trying to determine?”

“Yes, sir,” said Deputy Alexander. “The line has shifted so much here through the decades.”

Then he nearly fell backward as his boss's venomous gaze focused on him.

“Try the planning department,” Captain Hamilton said, “and then check the coordinates on Google Earth.”

“What?” said Sheriff Nottingham.

“Oh yes, you can do it on your phone,” Captain Hamilton said. “The latest border lines are all public record.”

“Your problem,” said Sheriff Nottingham, “is that you have no sense of the force of history.”

“And your problem, Sheriff, is that we still have to live in the present and you just aren't accepting that. But, don't worry – Lieutenant O'Reilly is doing printouts and is going to run them out here.”

“For at least 110 years, this wasn't Tinyville,” the sheriff growled.

“For only 104 years has there been a Lofton County – so, going by the nearest police force having jurisdiction, I've got you on history too, Sheriff, since your office is between Smallwood and Shortport.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly drove up – “Here you go, Captain!”

On came the printouts, and the comparison of landmarks, and some walking around, and the inevitable discovery, following the correct town-county line –.

“The whole scene ends here, one inch – one inch – inside Tinyville,” Sheriff Nottingham growled, shaking his head.

“Right,” Captain Hamilton said. “Anytime you need to know the correct lines, call me – I can give them to you with a quick check. Thank you for helping to establish jurisdiction, however; I appreciate the precision down to the tape measures. We'll call you if we need anything.”

“Look, Captain Hamilton,” Sheriff Nottingham began.

“I'll call you,” Captain Hamilton said, his gray eyes turning as cold as ice, “if I need anything, unless you have something germane to this matter to tell me now. Do you know who the victim is – and why he should have chosen this spot – or if he had chosen it at all?”

Sheriff Nottingham turned bright red, and he lied: “No, Captain.”

“Then, good evening, Sheriff. Lieutenant, bring on the yellow tape – we've only got a little sunlight left to work with and the scene has already been slightly corrupted.”

In the distance, Captain Hamilton could hear Sheriff Nottingham cursing up a storm, cursing at the deputies who should have used “Goggle, or whatever y'all call it” and saved him a trip. He was furious. That, by itself, was a form of evidence to note.

“What was that all about?” Lieutenant O'Reilly said. “I used to think all these people are professionals, but, sir –.”

“Keep looking backward while walking forward and you too can look like a fool at a moment's notice – the details we'll surely discover later, but right now, this.”

Lieutenant O'Reilly had done a good job cordoning off the scene, and just in time, because Tinyville was small and as people began to come into town from the Harvest Festival, they had started to congregate at the gruesome scene.

It was indeed gruesome – death by hanging always was, even without the variations at hand. With death came the end of the body's ability to hold its fluids, so the release of urine always destroyed the dignity of the victim. Just from the smell, Captain Hamilton knew the body had been hanging for most of the day, because urine became more and more pungent as time passed.

But there was also the equally sickening whiff of fecal matter – the bowels lost tension as well, and gravity took over if there were soft foods in the system. With time elapsed – yes, the victim had been there for quite a while, because just as Captain Hamilton approached, the underwear became overfull and the excess began sliding down the dead man's leg. But, that made it easy to gather a sample.

Those things were expected, but then there were the variations, all dependent on the strength of the rope and the thickness of the neck and the height – and thus the speed – with which the victim reached the end of the rope, and also the state of the body, the tension of the muscles at the time of death, and if there were any weak spots that might give way under the forces of inertia and gravity that met at the end of that rope.

The variations had not been kind to the victim, although he had broken his neck and so had not suffered much. He had been high enough, and heavy enough, and the branch had been strong enough thus far – thus far, for it was creaking ominously. Yet, the height and the weight had burst open a recent surgical scar in the victim's abdomen – he had burst open, and the upper end of those bowels was hanging out. The blood was everywhere, and, the smell of it also told of several hours out.

Meanwhile, the tree branch was still creaking ominously – the captain and his lieutenant were racing against both the fading light and the end of that branch's ability to hold the weight. It was necessary to photograph and collect all the evidence on the ground before relieving the branch of its burden – yet at the same time, neither man wished to do the final indignity to the body of letting it crash to the ground in its own mess.

The man – a big and tall Black man in middle age – was dressed well, business casual suit, good shoes, and, but for the violence a hanging does to the facial expression because of the effect on the spine and neck, he surely would have been handsome. Surely he would be identifiable to someone, in the sad, near future.

At last Captain Hamilton had wrapped a blanket as high as he could reach and gripped the body while Lieutenant O'Reilly drove his truck up close enough to stand in the truck bed and cut the victim down before the branch broke. Because of the onset of rigor mortis, the body did not flop over onto Captain Hamilton, but remained erect as he carefully lowered the body down – at the limit of his back strength, but the lieutenant was quick to get down and help – onto the sheet the two men had laid out for the body. Lieutenant O'Reilly was quick with the small camera while Captain Hamilton quickly checked the suit and pants pockets – empty, so nothing to go on there.

The hair – something was in the hair – salt-and-pepper, quite straight, slight odor of something like lye – Captain Hamilton could not quite make out what it was in the darkness, but he slipped it into a sample bag. Then, a quick unfolding of the blanket, and the body was hidden from further view – and then they had to move, because the branch had had enough. The captain and the lieutenant got themselves and the body clear just in time to avoid getting hit by the stout limb.

By this time, the sun was down and the crowd had gotten large and tense – the stark historical contrast between what Black people felt about the hanging of a Black man and what White people in the South felt about it seemed to be hanging in the air. This was part of the reason why Captain Hamilton had been very careful to get the victim down carefully and respectfully instead of letting the branch break with the victim, and had wrapped the body carefully to preserve it from view.

The county coroner arrived just as twilight began to deepen into night, and received the body. After that, Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly combined their flashlights to examine the branch that had fallen – it had broken quite a bit with the victim's weight, and then slowly sheared off the tree, as the scar on the tree also suggested. What was more unusual were the amount of small branches broken and crushed on top of the limb in addition to the obvious damage the rope had done in the spot where it was affixed. The tree also, on its trunk, showed some sign of disturbance in its bark – and, an unusual number of acorns was down as well, many more covered in blood than had fallen later as the branch had slowly broken, and thus were on top of the pool.

Whoever had done the job had done it well – the knots on the branch and that on the victim's neck were of a piece, carefully done so there would be no mistake. There was no sense of haste. On the scene, there were no footprints notable other than those of the sheriff and his men – but then, had there been other distinct ones, they had not noticed in their eagerness to figure out whether they could keep Captain Hamilton and Lieutenant O'Reilly from doing what they had just done.

Back to the little log cabin that housed police headquarters in Tinyville – both men were supposed to be off at 6:30, and calls to the station would bounce to their cell phones. But on this night, nothing doing.

Captain Hamilton called home to his wife Agnes.

“I know, Woody,” she said when she picked up. “It's on the news – a hanging.”

“Apparent suicide, but you know, we have to see what the evidence says.”

“They did it nicely enough, Ironwood,” she said. “No close-up pictures of the body, and the way you got that scene widely cordoned off helped.”

“I try to take care,” Captain Hamilton said. “No need to make matters worse than they already are – and besides, I'm sure social media will have the truly awful stuff. Remind Addison, little Agnes, and Iris of the protocol – don't go uncovering anything our household preferences on social media have covered.”

“Was it that bad, Woody?”

“It was so bad I wish Lieutenant O'Reilly and I didn't have to see it, and I certainly do not want you and the children to see it – and remember, Aggie, I've seen death all kinds of ways after 23 years in the Army. This was a bad one. It's my job to see it, and our job to make sure it doesn't come into the home except in my head.”

“I'm going right now, Woody, to remind them,” Mrs. Hamilton said. “When you get home, I'll have your bath drawn and some music on that will ease your thoughts in another direction.”

“Thank you, Aggie. I'm going to need it all. I'm aiming to be at home by 8:30pm, and if I can't be, I'll call you.”

“All right, Woody. Stay safe.”

“I will. I love you, Aggie.”

“I love you, Woody.”

Part 2 is up