Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [96]
In his own old age, Brooks had leased all but ten acres of his land to his son-in-law, Matthew Coleman, to farm. The chores that remained to him he carried out less by brawn than canny use of gravity. “He could do what he needed to do. It might take him three times as long, but he would get it done,” said Kim Brooks.
In his earlier years, he sawed his own boards with a sawmill he kept in the woods. He salted herring and smoked ham with a smoker he’d built himself. He hung beef in linen bags for aging. His two daughters learned to run a grader and feed the livestock—fifty head of cattle, as well as pigs and chickens. They gathered eggs, weeded the watermelon patch. When the combine harvested the corn, the children walked the rows after, picking up scrap to grind into feed. “Nothing was wasted,” Kim Brooks remembered. “He was very old-school that way.”
Slaughtering day at the Brooks farm was typical. Neighbors and family all helped, in exchange for meat. “It was a big mess, but we made a party of it,” said Kim Brooks. “We worked all day, and then at night there would be a barbecue, with hamburgers.”
None of it was very profitable. “We were all half-busted half of the time,” said Bobby Lakin, Brooks’s friend and Bible study teacher, who gave up farming in favor of the electrician’s trade. “Perry could’ve sold the whole place and been a millionaire. All farmers could sell out. But that’s not your purpose in life. Perry liked farming.”
In semi-retirement, Brooks’s chief pleasures remained what they’d always been: rabbit hunting with his beagles and daytrips for fishing in Deltaville, two hours southeast, where the Rappahannock River meets Chesapeake Bay. In winter, when farm chores eased, said Lakin, Brooks liked to sit around the fire, “smoking a pipe, laughing, and talking.”
Still, he could square off like a bull, taunting and unyielding, when he thought he’d been wronged. Several days before he died, Brooks drove his truck over to the second house on his property to have it out with a tenant who was several months behind on the rent, according to the tenant. The tenant had recently moved his daughter’s family into the house over Brooks’s objections. Brooks was suing for the back rent. The tenant in turn claimed that Brooks owed him almost as much money for improvements the tenant had made to the property.
Brooks drove down the driveway and blocked the tenant’s car as the man returned from work. As the two men began to shout from their car windows, the tenant’s wife and teenage daughter emerged from the house, cell phones in hand, screaming and threatening to call the sheriff. The women surrounded Brooks’s truck, and the tenant jumped out of his car, he said in an interview. Brooks, outnumbered and still behind the wheel, began to back up slowly. As he did, the women, standing behind his truck, redoubled their screaming. One jumped onto the back bumper, and the other was flung clear by her husband. The dispatcher at the sheriff’s department, mindful of the fence feud and not sure what was going on over at Brooks’s farm, sent several deputies.
When the law arrived, the incident was over. The women complained of leg pain but drove themselves to the hospital, where no injuries were diagnosed, according to hospital records.
Brooks was arrested, however, charged with hit and run and held for two days in the county jail. On his bail form, he listed his total cash assets at less than $1,000, put the value of his land at $1 million, and asked for a court-appointed lawyer. Kim Brooks said her father sounded abashed when she spoke to him after his release. “He said, ‘Can I just stay in jail?’” His daughter said she thought he sounded tired and unlike himself. “I remember thinking, if they could just keep him in jail for two weeks, everything would be okay.”
IF PERRY BROOKS WAS OLD-FASHIONED by temperament and financial necessity,