Red Clay Hands

Content Warning: Suicide, Murder, Blood, Drugs

Susanna ran barefoot through the woods, inhaling fear in every breath. Every few seconds, she turned her head over her right shoulder and looked back. She felt like Lot’s nameless wife, unable to take her eyes away from the doom that lay behind her. Truthfully, she looked back almost more than she looked ahead; trying to make sure it hadn’t caught up with her yet. She could have been a heroine, running from some evil abuser after having freed herself, but that just wasn’t so. 

The dead leaves crunched under her feet, layers upon layers of decay growing moist as they decomposed into the earth. She ran for so many miles that her feet were bruised and bloody and her legs scratched up to pieces, nearly to her knees. As she took one more paranoid look behind her, she finally lost her step. With a raw thud she fell backward, pushed purposefully like a sinner in the hands of an angry God.

For a long time she lay gasping through a mad fit of tears, sobbing in agony. Her body convulsed as she wept, yet she did not get up. After what may have been seconds or hours, her fit gave way to painful, introspective quietness. She did not move, and began to wonder if she might will herself to just disappear. At this point, another person might tease themselves with promises of suicide, or rationalize their actions to themselves, or beg the Lord for forgiveness. All Susanna did, bless her heart, was try to will herself away into the depths of some other dimension where the actions of this life didn’t matter. But all the stubbornness in her soul couldn’t make it happen. Nothing she did was going to make it disappear.

As for rationalizing her actions, that was something that Susanna was also incapable of doing. She tended to feel rather than think in her approach to life. But, sometimes to her detriment, she almost always acted deliberately on what she was feeling. Right now, however, she only felt the weight of the Appalachian Mountains surrounding her.

Susanna also couldn’t dare pray after what just happened. She hid from God like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve likely enjoyed their fruit before they realized they’d disobeyed, but Susanna had felt no pleasure in her sin as she acted upon it, not even the calm relief of revenge. She only did what she felt she should do, and she found herself unable to ignore her feelings.

Suddenly, she could no longer ignore her senses. The dampness from the deciduous leaves had soaked through her clothes right to her bones; she could bear it no longer and sat up. Her hands began to tremble furiously and she quietly stared at them in wonder. 

Weeks later, Susanna’s hands were in handcuffs as she sat in a cold metal chair and desk in a dank interrogation room that smelled like mildew. She imagined she’d been careful enough, but it was now painfully obvious she hadn’t—nobody is ever as careful as they think they are. It was all the better anyway: the guilt and paranoia ate her up. The last few weeks she poured over every local news broadcast, stopped going into work, and obsessed over every detail of that night, terrified to leave her house at all. When dozens of flashing blue lights showed up outside the house, she walked outside with hands up. It was a massive relief.

The entire police department had been on the case, and resources poured into it from the state—even the feds. It hadn’t taken ‘em that long to figure it all out. 

Susanna confessed immediately, and waived her right to a trial. The cops were bewildered. Why did this small, blonde-haired, freckled, green-eyed 20-year-old go from having no record to criminal? It didn’t make any sense. Her fingerprints were only in the system from the summer she worked at a daycare, when she had to be printed for licensing purposes. 

A sweaty, red-faced cop in uniform sat in front of her. He sat an audio recorder in front of her. There were so many people in the room: her just-assigned public defender, the police captain, a homicide detective, and even a district attorney. 

The rosy cheeked cop squirmed. “Okay, Susanna, we’re about to hit record. You ready?” She nodded, he pressed the button, and recited the date and time, along with his full name. “Susanna Green, we are interviewing you about the… the murder.” He started to visibly choke up, even though they’d been talking this over for hours at this point. “Sorry, I’m sorry, he was just a real good friend of mine. Susanna Green, do you have any… any information for us?”

Susanna nodded quietly, and spoke, gulping. The handcuffs were loose around her wrists; they knew she was in no danger of trying to leave or hurt anybody.

“When my mom got arrested and couldn’t find any work, we had to declare bankruptcy cause of the payday loans. Then we lost our house and had to all move into a one-bedroom apartment. My parents let us have bunk beds in the bedroom, while they slept on a pull-out sofa in the living room. We lost a lot of stuff, you know, from our old house. Couldn’t fit it in the apartment.” She continued.

“Mama just got… real depressed after all that. Daddy, he was working at the factory full-time to try and make ends meet, busting his butt and then working at home whenever he was around, because she didn’t try to cook or clean no more or nothin’. It was all real, real bad. She told us there was no point in bein’ around any more and we—we had to take care of ourselves… she just sat there sittin’ in a chair, watching TV all day but not really even that… and one day, you know, she, she saw the Sheriff come on TV, an ad for reelection or whatever. She didn’t say anything. She just turned off the TV.”

While Susanna talked, her eyes caught a glance up at the ceiling tiles above the interviewer’s head, looking at the orange stains from water damage snaking across the entire ceiling. It reminded her of the muddy brown creek by her house, the old house where she’d grown up. Mama and Daddy were happy. Mama made fried bologna sandwiches for lunch every Saturday, and they’d eat ‘em and head out to play in the heavy iron waters of the creek.

Her brother was content to turn cattails into fluffy clouds of white particles in the wind and try to catch crawdads in the water, but Susanna would sit down and dig her fingers into the beds of wet red clay that lined the creek, squeezing the viscous, mud-like orange goop between her hands. It was like nature’s playdough, and she spent hours digging into banks until her arms, her clothes, and everything on her body was covered in the red earth. Mama would bathe her and the bathwater turned the color of rust. No matter how much Mama scrubbed, there was always a little bit of red staining her fingers, especially under the fingernails. The damned old dirt wouldn’t go.

“The Sheriff ruined my life. Ten years ago, we got caught under those payday loans. We were plumb broke and we had all these car repairs we needed, but we got trapped, and we couldn’t pay ‘em back. And… he kept calling us, bothering us, started sending people to our house, asking when he’d get the money we owed. It must have been about $20,000 at that point, I don’t know. It’s against the law—you’re not supposed to harass people over debt. Eventually, the payday-loan-king himself, Johnny Allen was in our driveway. Daddy called the police, and the Sheriff came out personally. And… and I saw ‘em just laughing together. Johnny left and the Sheriff asked to come inside and talk.” Susanna shifted her weight in the chair, feeling a tinge of her anger return with the memory.

“He said we shouldn’t have taken out loans if we didn’t wanna pay ‘em back. Then…,” her voice wavered, “Then—he picked up a little Gatorade bottle from the counter and said it had meth in it. I never seen any drugs in the house before, but he said it was my mama’s. She rightly said it wasn’t, but the Sheriff arrested her anyhow. The lawyer they gave us said she would stay outta jail if she just confessed to it. So she did, because she didn’t know any better. She didn’t go to jail, but it was big news in town. The paper published her mugshot with the meanest headline, something like Local Mother Found With Meth in Front of Children or something awful like that. Momma lost her job and couldn’t get any more work after that.”

The darkness of the mountain above her was still, a kind of stillness that felt like it was following you until you looked. The same way as ghosts move. As Susanna crept towards the tiny cabin from the tree-line, she thought how had never so much as been in a fistfight before. The worst it’d ever come to was a scuffle with her cousin or brother, but momma never let it escalate. So it came as quite a shock to her how easy it was for her to sneak through the open window—open as if by fate she thought—without making a sound, walk silently over to the edge of the bed, and plunge her daddy’s bowie knife into the Sheriff’s throat while he slept. It was as if she had no control over her hands as the knife tore apart the thin bones in his neck. Blood gurgled out unceremoniously. The Sheriff opened his mouth as if to gasp as the knife entered his throat. It strangely reminded Susanna of the way a woman gasps when a man enters her too suddenly, and made her think of sins she enjoyed far more than this one.

Susanna’s hands were clumsy and there wasn’t quite enough force behind her plunge for an instant death, but the skin was thin. He instinctively grasped for her hands, but knew it was too late. Once the knife was in, she tore viciously back and forth, hoping to hit something important. His eyes met hers and his soul left his body in the same moment she felt her soul damned to hell. It was over. She stared at the fresh corpse for only a moment before an adrenaline rush hit her. She quickly searched for his car keys and found them in a coat pocket hanging on a chair. The cabin wasn’t very big, built by the Sheriff himself, a one-room with lighting and everything. Susanna fearfully glanced at a worn Bible resting on the desk next to the small twin bed, then back to the Sheriff.

Even though she’d repeated this story a few times already for various investigators and lawyers, she was crying again.

“And one day we came home from school and Mama—,” she gulped, ”Mama was dead. She’d taken all these over-the-counter pills, just regular stuff. She was gone. I was 16 years old. A few days later, we had her funeral on the same day the Sheriff won reelection. I tried to move on with my life after that, you know. My brother and I helped out around the house, got jobs. We finally moved out of that apartment finally and back into a nice little rental home. Didn’t want to be around where Mama had died anyway. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Sheriff. I know he planted that meth to punish my mama, for his friend Johnny Allen! I know he did. He ruined our lives. If it hadn’t been for him… She never woulda killed herself. I just know it.”

She let the accusation linger. The red-faced cop squinted his eyes, and the rest of them were staring at her too.

After he was dead, the Sheriff’s mouth was shaped in an “o” and his eyes were wide open. His life was gone, but the shock would remain etched into his face until his lips rotted away from his face. Deep, dark blood stained the white sheets around him, but the blood wasn’t nearly as gruesome as she expected. Susanna was normally squeamish near any instance of blood or death, unable to even glance at roadkill without wanting to vomit. It was the eyes that were much worse than the blood ever could be.

She wrapped the bloody bed sheets around the Sheriff, and in one firm tug pulled the body off of the bed and onto the floor. He was heavy, and she was not strong, but somehow it was as if the corpse was as light as a feather. 

All while leading to this moment, Susanna felt like she had to murder the man who’d taken her Mama, but she didn’t really want to deal with it now that she’d done it. She’d taken an Uber to the bottom of Signal Mountain, told the driver she was going for a hike, and walked all the way up to where the Sheriff’s hunting cabin was. She’d spent over a year walking and driving around this mountain. It had taken her about eight hours to get all the way up there, where she knew he was sleeping. Susanna took a quick drink directly from the tap at the sink; the first she’d had in hours. She didn’t think she’d left any fingerprints…

“Anyway,” Susanna continued, “I learned a few years later that the Sheriff had hisself a hunting cabin up in the mountains. He gave an interview about what he liked to do in his time off on the local news station, you know, trying to humanize the police or whatever. So, I went up near Signal Mountain, drove along looking at all the hunting cabins. I hung around the police office a bit. I followed his car home. I saw his Jeep in his garage as he was opening it. I memorized his Jeep, the license number. Then I waited at a couple entrances to the mountain every Friday. One day, I saw him—I followed him a bit up the mountain until the main road ended, because I didn’t want him to know I was following. I got out and walked around on foot, following trails and parkways until I saw the Jeep.”

Outside the cabin, she found his car—a Jeep, not his police car, the Dodge Chargers they’d spent so many taxpayer dollars on. She clumsily dragged the body into its trunk, and immediately jumped into the car. She started driving up the winding mountain path, waiting to get to the very top, trying to get off the main mountain road—but not too far off, because she struggled to see it in the dark. At one point she came to a walking trail with a “Do not enter” sign. She gulped and ran the Jeep straight through the sign and hoped not to die, trying her best to stick to the walking trail.

She had no idea where she was going. She feared driving off the mountain at any moment. The headlights showed a small gap between the trees, and that’s where she stopped, backing the car up toward the gap. She opened the rear-gate and gave a last glance at the corpse, covered in sheets he’d slept in, soaked in blood. She leaned over and touched him on the shoulder as if to wake him from his sleep. A dark cold radiated through the sheets.

“Fuck,” Susanna said.

The red-faced cop interjected her thoughts. “How long did it take you to follow him and find his hunting cabin?”

Susanna didn’t flinch. “Fourteen months,” she said. “It was hard to piece together. The address wasn’t listed or anything. I knew he’d notice if I followed him too closely, so sometimes I lost him trying to follow him, because I wanted to make sure he didn’t notice me. Sometimes I used my daddy’s car or my brother’s car just so he wouldn’t get too suspicious of my old pickup truck. But once I found out where he lived, I just went up the very next weekend—this time I had an Uber drop me off nearby—and saw he’d left the window open. I had my daddy’s bowie knife on me. I felt like it was a sign that I was meant to kill him.”

The sweaty cop looked her square in the eye as she said it. “As revenge for your uh, mom killing herself. So you say. And the Sheriff supposedly planting the meth, because of his friendship with Johnny Allen, because you owed him some money.” 

Susanna said, “Y’all just think you can get away with anything. It doesn’t matter who you hurt.”

“If that was the case,” the cop shot back, “Why didn’t you report him? Post about it online? Get a good lawyer?” 

“None of y’all care about us. Not in small towns. Not anywhere! Cops get away with anything they want. Nobody believed Mama when she said it wasn’t hers. Anyway—yes. It was me. I killed the Sheriff! I stabbed him through the throat with a bowie knife while he was sleeping. I moved his body into his own car with the bedsheets and I rolled it down the cliff. Then I ran all the way down the mountain. I eventually hitched a ride back home, said I was running away from a mean boyfriend. This was all about four weeks ago. I confess, I’m guilty. I did it.” Tears pooled in the bottom of her eyes.

“Do you regret it?” asked the cop.

She knew she’d done wrong. Real wrong. The kind you can’t take back, and she wouldn’t if she could’ve anyhow. Still, she was filled with regret and disgust at herself. She began to shake as she closed the rear door, and put the car into neutral. She pushed the car with some effort, toward the edge of what she hoped was a cliff. The headlights showed some kind of drop. She couldn’t hope for a big cliff necessarily—just somewhere remote where no one would notice. She didn’t go near to look how deep it might be. She was terrified.

With one final push, the Jeep took the Sheriff down the edge below. Hopefully it was remote enough, high enough to hide him. And then, the lights were all gone.

The full moon shimmered above, high in the sky. Her brother could have probably told her what time it was by its placement, but Susanna never learned anything so useful. 

Susanna looked around herself, not sure what to do next now that the deed had been done, and slowly began to panic. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t know how to get back. Her Converse knock-offs, of all things, were covered in blood. Susanna tore them off along with her socks and threw them as well, but never heard a “thunk.” Not knowing what else to do, she began running, downhill, through the forest. 

“I… I regret that I murdered somebody,” she said, looking downward. She couldn’t face the people in front of her. “It’s a harder thing to live with than I imagined. But I don’t regret that he’s dead.”

The cop stood up at this, turning off the audio recorder as he did. “You know he had a girlfriend, right? And kids from an ex-wife?”

“What about my family? What about my mama? They ain’t the only one to lose a parent here!” Susanna shot back.

“Your mama was an addict and killed herself!!” he shouted. The stoic police captain laid a hand on his shoulder, and the red-faced cop sat back down, fuming.

There was silence for a moment, and the captain said, “Thank you, Susanna. We’re gonna be moving you to another correctional facility, one called Silverdale, in the morning. If you need to talk to your lawyer, now’s the time. The judge’ll set a sentencing date soon. I’ll bring you some water.”

After they’d all left, the public defender, a short-haired Black woman named Erica, turned to her and said “Well, with the guilty plea for a first-time offense, you’re not going to get the death penalty. You’re looking at a standard life-without-parole case right here on a first-degree murder charge. Do you understand, Susanna?”

“I want the death penalty,” she said quietly. Even though Susanna felt great relief after confessing, she didn’t think she was prepared to deal with the lifelong consequences of being trapped in prison, alone with her thoughts, replaying the murder in her head over and over again. It felt right, but it certainly didn’t bring her mama back. 

“You can’t get it once you plead guilty. Even if you hadn’t, you probably still couldn’t get it. Women almost never get the death penalty. Especially white women,” she said, sighing. “And now I’m going to have to see about having you put on suicide watch at Silverdale tomorrow.”

“But I’m not…” Susanna stuttered.

“Yeah, you are,” she responded, interrupting her. “You think you know about injustice in this system? I’m not sure what statement you think you’ve made. Yet—you wanted to get caught. You might as well have left big billboard signs pointing to your front door. You wanted to make a grand statement. If you hadn’t spent so much time stalking the man to begin with, I’d try to argue you down to an insanity plea. But, there’s too much intent here. Too much premeditation in your actions. It wouldn’t work. They’ll let you rot away in prison for the rest of your life instead. Maybe we can get you some psychiatric help inside the pen, but it’s not the greatest in there.”

Erica shook her head, grabbed her briefcase, and stood up.

“I’ll see you at your sentencing trial, but that will be a few months out. If you need anything, you can call me. I’ll stop by a day or two before the trial, and give your brother and father the details. Your dad brought a letter for you—I’ll give it to one of the officers and have them bring it to you at Silverdale.”

Erica nodded toward Susanna and walked out the door.

The next day, Susanna was transported to Silverdale prison. After processing, they gave her khaki prison scrubs and introduced her to the general population. Then she lay down on a small, uncomfortable bed in a tiny cell. There was just a toilet and a sink in the room. It was over. At least for a few months. This was her life now, and probably forever. She asked the prison guards who had taken her to her cell if there was a “preacher man” who would come by and talk to her. “Sure,” one of them said. “But it won’t do you no good. He can’t save a cop killer’s soul.” He stuck his hand out, holding an envelope, “Here’s a letter that they sent over. Fan mail already, I guess.”

Nobody in Susanna’s family had come to see her yet, but as she sat down on the bed she voraciously opened the letter. Inside it read, “Haven’t been able to see you yet. Hopefully I’ll find some time to come down when you’re all settled in. We’re not doing too great. I can’t stand all the media trucks in front of the house all the time. I didn’t ask for this. I feel like I’ve lost a wife, and now a daughter. I don’t know why you think you had to do what you did. You didn’t have to do it. We could have moved on and tried to be okay. I still love you, but I will never understand why you did this. Yours, Daddy.” Susanna felt cold—but folded up the letter and put it under her new, striped, pillowcase-less pillow. She hadn’t heard from her brother at all. They couldn’t ignore her forever, could they? She thought she’d done this for THEM, too... 

Susanna sat up from the bed. She went over to the sink and looked into the dull silver tray that was meant to be her mirror. Then she took the fresh bar of soap she’d just received—meant for body, face, and hands—and unwrapped it. Turning on the faucet, she stuck her hands under the water—it was ice cold. There was no hot water at all. In the distance, she heard the chaos of conversation and yelling outside her cell. “New girl, cop killer!” she heard someone scream.

She rubbed the bar of soap vigorously between her hands, over and over again, digging her fingernails into the soft bed of the white bar to try to get underneath her fingernails. “Won’t do  no good,” said Susanna, over and over again, scrubbing her hands together under the frigid water with her shrinking bar of soap. “Won’t do no good.”

Eat with the author…

Fried bologna sandwiches

Ingredients:

1 tbs. Duke’s mayonnaise

2 slices of white sandwich bread

2 slices thick-sliced bologna 

1 slice American cheese

1 tbs. canola or neutral oil

Steps:

1.) Heat a skillet (preferably cast-iron) on medium heat. Add the oil.

2.) Lightly toast two slices of white bread in a toaster or toaster oven.

3.) Cut four small slits around both slices of bologna to prevent them from curling up when they fry.

4.) Fry bologna on both sides until they’re brown; around 3-4 minutes per side. Then, place slice of American cheese on top and let cook until slightly melted.

5.) Spread mayonnaise on one of the slices of bread.

6.) Assemble two slices of cooked bologna on the other slice of bread.  

7.) Smash the bread slices together in a sandwich and enjoy.