Bag of Bones (74 page)

deserted. She knows there's an Eastern Star supper in Kashwakamak, of course, has even contributed a mushroom pie to it because she has made friends of some of the Eastern Star ladies. They'll all be down there getting ready. What she doesn't know is that today is also Dedication Day for the new Grace Baptist Church, the first real church ever to be built on the TR. A slug of locals have gone, heathen as well as Baptist. Faintly, from the other side of the lake, she can hear the Methodists singing. The sound is sweet and faint and beautiful; distance and echo has tuned every sour voice.

She isn't aware of the men—most of them very young men, the kind who under ordinary circumstances dare only look at her from the corners of their eyes—until the oldest one among them speaks. “Wellnow, a black whore in a white dress and a red belt! Damn if that ain't just a little too much color for lakeside. What's wrong with you, whore? Can't you take a hint?”

She turns toward him, afraid but not showing it. She has lived thirty-six years on this earth, has known what a man
has and where he wants to put it since she was eleven, and she understands that when men are together like this and full of redeye (she can smell it), they give up thinking for themselves and turn into a pack of dogs. If you show fear they will fall on you like dogs and likely tear you apart like dogs.

Also, they have been laying for her. There can be no other explanation for them turning up like this.

“What hint is that, sugar?” she asks, standing her ground. Where is everyone? Where can they all be? God damn! Across the lake, the Methodists have moved on to “Trust and Obey,” a droner if there ever was one.

“That you ain't got no business walking where the white folks walk,” Harry Auster says. His adolescent voice breaks into a kind of mouse-squeak on the last word and she laughs. She knows how unwise that is, but she can't help it—she's never been able to help her laughter, any more than she's ever been able to help the way men like this look at her breasts and bottom. Blame it on God.

“Why, I walk where I do,” she says. “I was told this was common ground, ain't nobody got a right to keep me out. Ain't nobody has. You seen em doin it?”

“You see us now,” George Armbruster says, trying to sound tough.

Sara looks at him with a species of kindly contempt that makes George shrivel up inside. His cheeks glow hot red. “Son,” she says, “you only come out now because the decent folks is all somewheres else. Why do you want to let this old fella tell you what to do? Act decent and let a lady walk.”

I see it all. As Devore fades and fades, at last becoming nothing but eyes under a blue cap in the rainy afternoon (through him I can see the shattered remains of my swimming float washing against the embankment), I see it all. I see her as she

starts forward, walking straight at Devore. If she stands here jawing with them, something bad is going to happen. She feels it, and she never questions her feelings. And if she walks at any of the others, ole massa'll bore in on her from the side, pulling the rest after. Ole massa in the little ole blue cap is the wheeldog, the one she must face down. She can do it, too. He's strong, strong enough to make these boys one creature,
his
creature, at least for the time being, but he doesn't have her force, her determination, her energy. In a way she welcomes this confrontation. Reg has warned her to be careful, not to move too fast or try to make real friends until the rednecks (only Reggie calls them “the bull gators”) show themselves—how many and how crazy—but she goes her own course, trusts her own deep instincts. And here they are, only seven of em, and really just the one bull gator.

I'm stronger than you, ole massa,
she thinks, walking toward him. She fixes her eyes on his and will not let them drop; his are the ones that drop, his the mouth that quivers uncertainly at one corner, his the tongue that comes out as quick as a lizard's tongue to wet the lips, and all that's good . . . but even better is when he falls back a step. When he does that the rest of them cluster in two groups of three, and there it is, her way through. Faint and sweet are the Methodists, faithy music carrying across the lake's still surface. A droner of a hymn, yes, but sweet across the miles.

When we walk with the Lord

in the light of His word,

what a glory He sheds on our way . . .

I'm stronger than you, sugar,
she sends,
I'm meaner than you, you may be the bull gator but I'm the
queen bee and if you don't want me stingin on you, you best clear me the rest of my path.

“You bitch,” he says, but his voice is weak; he is already thinking this isn't the day, there's something about her he didn't quite see until he saw her right up close, some black-nigger hougan he didn't feel until now, better wait for another day, better—

Then he trips over a root or a rock (perhaps it's the very rock behind which she will finally come to rest) and falls down. His cap falls off, showing the big old bald spot on top of his head. His pants split all the way up the seam. And Sara makes a crucial mistake. Perhaps she underestimates Jared Devore's own very considerable personal force, or perhaps she just cannot help herself—the sound of his britches ripping is like a loud fart. In any case she laughs—that raucous, smoke-broken laugh which is her trademark. And her laugh becomes her doom.

Devore doesn't think. He simply gives her the leather from where he lies, big feet in pegged loggers' boots shooting out like pistons. He hits her where she is thinnest and most vulnerable, in the ankles. She hollers in shocked pain as the left one breaks; she goes down in a tumble, losing her furled parasol out of one hand. She draws in breath to scream again and Jared says from where he is lying, “Don't let her! Dassn't let her holler!”

Ben Merrill falls on top of her full-length, all one hundred and ninety pounds of him. The breath she has drawn to scream with whooshes out in a gusty, almost silent sigh instead. Ben, who has never even danced with a woman, let alone lain on top of one like this, is instantly excited by the feel of her struggling beneath him. He wriggles against her, laughing, and when she rakes her nails down his cheek he barely feels it. The way it seems to him, he's all cock and a
yard long. When she tries to roll over and get out from under that way, he rolls with her, lets her be on top, and he is totally surprised when she drives her forehead down on his. He sees stars, but he is eighteen years old, as strong as he will ever be, and he loses neither consciousness nor his erection.

Oren Peebles tears away the back of her dress, laughing. “Pig-pile!” he cries in a breathy little whisper, and drops on top of her. Now he is dry-humping her topside and Ben is dry-humping just as enthusiastically from underneath, dryhumping like a billygoat even with the blood pouring down the sides of his head from the split in the center of his brow, and she knows that if she can't scream she is lost. If she can scream and if Kito hears, he'll run and get help, run and get Reg—

But before she can try again, ole massa is squatting beside her and showing her a long-bladed knife. “Make a sound and I'll cut your nose off,” he says, and that's when she gives up. They have brought her down after all, partly because she laughed at the wrong time, mostly out of pure buggardly bad luck. Now they will not be stopped, and best that Kito should stay away—please God keep him back where he was, it was a good patch of berries, one that should keep him occupied an hour or more. He loves berry-picking, and it won't take these men an hour. Harry Auster yanks her hair back, tears her dress off one shoulder, and begins to sucker on her neck.

Ole massa the only one not at her. Old massa standing back, looking both ways along The Street, his eyes slitted and wary; old massa look like a mangy timberwolf done eaten a whole generation of chickenhouse chickens while managing to avoid every trap and snare. “Hey Irish, quit on her a minute,” he tells Harry, then widens his wise gaze
to the others. “Get her in the puckies, you damn fools. Get her in there deep.”

They don't. They can't. They are too eager to have her. They arm-yank her behind the forehead of gray rock and call it good. She doesn't pray easily but she prays now. She prays for them to let her live. She prays for Kito to stay clear, to keep filling his bucket slow by eating every third handful. She prays that if he does take a notion to catch up with her, he will see what's happening and run the other way as fast as he can, run silent and get Reg.

“Stick this in your mouth,” George Armbruster pants. “And don't you bite me, you bitch.”

They take her top and bottom, back and front, two and three at a time. They take her where anybody coming along can't help but see them, and ole massa stands off a little, looking first at the panting young men grouped around her, kneeling with their trousers down and their thighs scratched from the bushes they are kneeling in, then he peers up and down the path with his wild and wary eyes. Incredibly, one of them—it is Fred Dean—says “Sorry, ma'am” after he's shot his load feels like halfway up to east bejeezus. It's as if he accidentally kicked her in the shin while crossing his legs.

And it doesn't end. There's come down her throat, come running down the crack of her ass, the young one has bitten the blood right out of her left breast, and it doesn't end. They are young, and by the time the last one has finished, the first one, oh God, the first one is ready again. Across the river the Methodists are now singing “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine” and as ole massa approaches her she thinks,
It's almost over, woman, he the last, hold on hold steady and it be over.
He looks at the skinny redhead and the one who keeps squinching his eye up and tossing his head and
tells them to watch the path, he's going to take his turn now that she's broke in.

He unbuckles his belt, he unbuttons his flies, he pushes down his underwear—dirty black at the knees and dirty yellow at the crotch—and as he drops a knee on either side of her she sees that ole massa's little massa is just as floppy as a snake with its neck broke and before she can stop it, that raucous laugh bursts all unexpected from her again—even lying here covered with the hot jelly spend of her rapists, she can't help but see the funny side.

“Shut up!” Devore growls at her, and smashes the heel of one hard hand across her face, breaking her cheekbone and her nose. “Shut up that howling!”

“Reckon it might get stiffer if it was one of your boys layin here with his rosy red ass stuck up in the air, sugar?” she asks, and then, for the last time, Sara laughs.

Devore draws his hand back to hit her again, his naked loins lying against her naked loins, his penis a flaccid worm between them. But before he can bring the hand down a child's voice cries, “Ma! What they doin to you, Ma? Git off my mama, you bastards!”

She sits up in spite of Devore's weight, her laughter dying, her wide eyes searching Kito out and finding him, a slim young boy of eight standing on The Street, dressed in overalls and a straw hat and brand-new canvas shoes, carrying a tin bucket in one hand. His lips are blue with juice. His eyes are wide with confusion and fright.

“Run, Kito!”
she screams.
“Run away h—”

Red fire explodes in her head; she swoons back into the bushes, hearing ole massa from a great distance: “Get him. Dassn't let him ramble, now.”

Then she's going down a long dark slope, she's lost in a Ghost House corridor that leads only deeper and deeper into
its own convoluted bowels; from that deep falling place she hears him, she hears, her darling one, he is

screaming. I heard him screaming as I knelt by the gray rock with my carry-bag beside me and no idea how I'd gotten to where I was—I certainly had no memory of walking here. I was crying in shock and horror and pity. Was she crazy? Well, no wonder. No fucking wonder. The rain was steady but no longer apocalyptic. I stared at my fishy-white hands on the gray rock for a few seconds, then looked around. Devore and the others were gone.

The ripe and gassy stench of decay filled my nose—it was like a physical assault. I fumbled in the carry-bag, found the Stenomask Rommie and George had given me as a joke, and slipped it over my mouth and nose with fingers that felt numb and distant. I breathed shallowly and tentatively. Better. Not a lot, but enough to keep from fleeing, which was undoubtedly what she wanted.

“No!” she cried from somewhere behind me as I grabbed the spade and dug in. I tore a great mouth in the ground with the first swipe, and each subsequent one deepened and widened it. The earth was soft and yielding, woven through with mats of thin roots which parted easily under the blade.

“No! Don't you dare!”

I wouldn't look around, wouldn't give her a chance to push me away. She was stronger down here, perhaps because it had happened here. Was that possible? I didn't know and didn't care. All I cared about was getting this done. Where the roots were thicker, I hacked through them with the pruning knife.

“Leave me be!”

Now I
did
look around, risked one quick glance because of the unnatural crackling sounds which had accompanied her voice—which now seemed to
make
her voice. The Green Lady was gone. The birch had somehow become Sara Tidwell: it was Sara's face growing out of the criss-crossing branches and shiny leaves. That rain-slicked face swayed, dissolved, came together, melted away, came together again. For a moment all the mystery I had sensed down here was revealed. Her damp shifting eyes were utterly human. They stared at me with hate and supplication.