Ray 4

I was ten-years old when Dad went to see the Carroll County sheriff at the courthouse in Carrollton. His name was Nunley, but I don't remember the first name, not having written it down. In my notebook, I refer to him as Sheriff Nunley. I do remember that his name started with an "L" I think. Something like Lagoon but I know that's not it. Nobody would be named Lagoon although some people are named Colin. Lagrone, it was Lagrone. Wow, it just came to me. Lagrone Nunley.

He had a picture in his office, hanging on the wall, of himself and his son receiving an award for their Sunday School attendance so I know he was a church goer, and I would think he would tell the truth being a sheriff and a church man to boot. He told Dad almost the same thing Roy Sims did, that he remembered Ray from way back and so did the sheriff's dad. In fact, he told us that his grandfather said the same thing, that Ray was around looking just like he looked then when Lagrone Nunley's granddad was a boy. 

I also remember the sheriff saying that his daddy never told a lie in his life, but he wasn't so sure about his granddad, not because he was an untruthful person but because he was getting pretty old and was often confused and may have "disrembered." Disremembered. I wrote that one down and later tried to find it in Websters. I was a smart aleck like that. I loved to catch grown ups in mistakes, although I never said anything to them directly. I was too shy and too respectful for that. But I loved to brag to Mom and Dad on how Mr. So and So got it wrong, used an incorrect word.

He, the sheriff, also told us that they used to arrest Ray every time he came to town. They did it, he said, partly to keep him out of trouble, because he fought a lot, and partly so they could feed him and give him a warm place to sleep at night. As far as the adverse possession went, he could do nothing. "I can bluff him," he said, "but legally, I can't do nothin'." That was the last time Dad tried to do anything about Ray, as far as I know. If he tried other ways to get rid of Ray, I never said anything about it in front of me.

So Ray was just around, and we would sometimes see his boot tracks in the gully when we bird hunted. That always pissed Dad but we almost never saw him. Now and then, we would drive by him while he walked along Humphrey Highway or the gravel road. Just the sight of him made me afraid, and I asked Dad if he could whip him if they ever got into a fight. Dad said he could, and a boy wants to believe his dad can whip the whole world. But I wondered. He wore leather boots, jeans, and some kind of light denim jacket. He always seemed to be wearing the same thing winter or summer, and he always looked the same.

Slowly, the mysteriousness and frightfulness of Ray grew until he was a virtual monster in my mind. David Pentecost, who lived two doors down from us on West Harding Street, had a grandfather that used to visit them and he always stayed for a few weeks. I think he traveled from child to child and stayed with each one a while like my grandmother did the last years of her life. Mr. Shute and I would sit under an oak tree in the Pentecosts' front yard and chew tobacco and talk about hunting, squirrel hunting mostly. One day when I was fourteen, Ray came up. Mr. Shute, who had to be eighty years old if a day, said he, like everybody else, remembered Ray from way back and that he looked the same now as back then. The old man had farmed and raised his family in the Coila area which he told me had a lot more people in it then than now. That surprised me because I assumed that towns and areas always got bigger and never smaller. I never thought of a town dying or an area having less people although it should not have surprised me because I watched all the cowboy flicks and they often had ghost towns in them.

Anyway, Mr. Shute told me all sorts of stuff. He told me about the tornado that destroyed his house, injured his whole family, and killed one of his kids. He himself woke up in a field with a broken leg. He told me how lively downtown Coila was back then. He told me about a man who got his head chopped off. The de-headed man was wearing a white button down shirt under his clean overalls and there was only a drop or two of blood on the shirt. Mr. Shute saw it himself. I asked him why, and he didn't know. I asked him if the murderer was ever caught and he said no. I asked him if he had suspicions on anybody and he said everybody did. Then he dropped the bombshell. He said they were all sure who did it but there was no proof. "It was Ray," he said. "That devil man Ray Azel."