Days of Little Texas (21 page)

“Lucy!”

The sight is something I will remember the rest of my life: Lucy’s thin, pale legs, the wet material of her dress snapping in the wind, matchstick arms pumping, hair ’lectrified, as she crosses the lake. She’s so
brave
. The most brave thing I have ever seen. But it’s more than that.

Certain Certain says there is such a thing as something being bigger than big—it’s nothing to do with physical size. For the first time I understand what he has been talking about. I can see it right there in Lucy’s body, balancing all the beautiful strangeness of who she is in the way she steps.

I wish so much Certain Certain could be here to see this. I can’t help but think of our Lord walking on water.

I throw the umbrella down and dig in with my paddle, stroking the way Faye Barlow showed me. Lightning slaps the world again, making the trees on Devil Hill look like burning skeletons. Rain starts to run in my eyes.

I can’t see Lucy anymore.

Another flash hits and I can see the trestle—so big and strange and surprising I bang the canoe with the paddle. I pull through the pillowy black, thinking about that sunken town below me. Cracked roads, ramshackly houses sprouting river weeds. Maybe a
dog
. Some dog nobody remembered, scared to pieces, running through the overgrown yards, whimpering just before he got thrown under a million tons of dark water.

Shut up. Just paddle. Shut up. Shut up
.

“Lucy!
”

“Here,” she calls out suddenly. “Over here!”

I swing the flashlight around and see a flash of blue further upstream than I figured. I stroke hard for it. Lucy is standing there with a pole in her hands, a
metal
pole, floating just above the wood of the dock, rain jumping around her small feet. She looks like an angel.

Lucy drops the pole and gives me a hand up. It feels so good to touch her again. My hair and clothes are sopping. I look at the umbrella, feeling ridiculous.

“Come on,” Lucy says.

We climb Devil Hill to the clearing. Even with the flashlight, it’s hard to see where we’re going. There are the pillars of the old house, pale and colorless. The stage is draped in tarpaulins that show up blue in the flashlight. A leaf glues itself to my cheek.

“We need to hurry!” Lucy yells over the storm.

She heads for the trees, with me chasing behind. Lucy is taking me to the trail where Faye Barlow showed me the pitcher plants. It curls off into a black so deep, it eats the flashlight beam whole.

The footing is slick, and Lucy gets further and further ahead, till I lose sight of her around the bend. But finally I come to a place I recognize—there’s the fallen sycamore where the fox left me, right at the edge of that deep yellow and green clearing Faye Barlow didn’t want me to see.

Is this where it lives?

Lucy’s standing in what looks to be a room carved entirely out of leaves and branches.

“This is where it is holding them,” she says. “After you see it, don’t hang around too long. We don’t know when the rain might stop.”

“What am I looking for?” I say.

“You’ll know,” Lucy says. “Hurry. It won’t be safe if you don’t.”

I take a couple of nervous steps deeper into the clearing, spraying the flashlight beam around. I aim the light up. The branches are so thick overhead, it’s almost like a roof.

A snaky little cold dances over my shoulders. This place feels like something has marked it for its own.
Claimed it
.

A few more steps into the clearing, and I feel it. I’ve become a trespasser.

I shine the light around, angle it out further.

There it is—right in the center of all that space—the biggest, most scabbedy old tree I’ve ever seen.

The base is at least six foot across and probably twenty foot around or more. The trunk is covered with curly rolls of bark like silvery paper and burls the size of punkins. The whole tree looks
twisted
, as if some giant hands have wrung it out like a dish towel. Long roots as big around as a man’s waist shoot out from the base of the tree in all directions.

I turn and look back; Lucy is still there, standing in the same spot, arms at her sides, head cocked a little. The light passes through her again—I can see the flashlight beam clear up the trail.

The wind pushes through the giant tree, making the limbs move, heavy and creaky. I can hear the leaves beating against each other, and branches rubbing against branches.

Then I hear it. Metal knocking against metal in the wind. “There’s something hanging up there,” I say. I move a little closer.

“Far enough!” Lucy calls. “Hey! That’s far enough.
Come back
. If you stay too long, it will know you are here.”

But I have to see the tree up close. I have to.

The woods glisten and whisper. I shine the flashlight beam in front of me and creep forward.

“Please!” Lucy cries out. “Come back—it’s not safe!”

When it happens, I don’t know what to call it.

The closest thing I can compare it to is when you nearly fall out of a high tree—the way your lungs puff out and everything inside you comes rushing up under your heart. Because you know how close you came to dying. Right then, right there.

That’s what comes over me—if you could multiply it times a hundred. Like the bottom has dropped out. Not just the bottom under my feet, but the bottom under my
life
. There is nothing supporting me. I’m hanging in midair, fixing to plummet straight down into everlasting fire and damnation.

“Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.”

I drop the flashlight and double over in the leaves, clutching at my stomach. A wave of sickness barrels up my throat; I have to fight to keep from puking. And then I do puke, and it keeps coming and coming till there’s nothing left inside me. Then my body keeps trying to puke, but nothing is there, and it hurts so much, but I can’t make it stop.

Finally it does stop, and I fall over on my side in the wet leaves. I’m going to die. Right here. Right now. I’m not even sure that I care. Something grabs hold of my arm.

“Come on!
”

But I’m still so sick, I can’t move. I mumble something to
her. Then she’s hauling me up. Dragging me to my feet, pulling me away from the tree.

I swear two or three times, but Lucy just jerks me toward the trail like I weigh no more than a sack full of leaves. I stumble after her, not able to think about anything but the pain.

Without the flashlight, I have to trust her to know where we are running. I’m getting whipsawed by branches, tripped by roots, then a branch catches me in the forehead. I put my hand to my face, and it comes back slick and warm.

“Keep going!” Lucy says.
“Hurry!
”

We stumble into the plantation clearing, then slip down the hill to the water.

“Get in,” Lucy says. “Get in! Get in!”

She shoves me into the canoe and piles in behind me. Takes up a paddle and starts to stroke. “I’ll help.”

We slide away from the dock. I pick up a paddle and stroke hard as I can. Then it’s all black, and I don’t remember another thing till I’m back at the house.

I’m up in my bedroom. Alone.

Am I in shock? My stomach feels like it’s been turned inside out. My head is sloshing like a yolk in an egg. But my clothes are draped across a chair to dry, and I’m laying in bed holding a damp rag to the gash in my forehead.

Faye Barlow, she is right. There is something evil on that island. Something so evil it makes me sick about the world. Just like I get sick watching the news. Knowing we are sharing the Lord’s earth with people who murder little girls at gas stations. Chop heads off in Iraq. Lock folks up in their basement
to torture them. Evil you can’t talk to, can’t work your way around. It makes me sick and afraid.

The evil on the island is an evil that can come inside your mind anytime you get close enough to it.

And I don’t know how to keep it out.

And I don’t know what Lucy is. I might not ever know. But I know what she is to
me
. Whatever she is, it is good.

I pick up my little Bible computer and start punching buttons.

Turns out the word
love
appears 640 times. Nearly three times more than the word
hate
. It’s in there more often than
salvation
. More than
redemption
, more than
resurrection
or
Savior
or even
Christ
.

Love
is in the Bible nearly ten times as often as
hell
.

It’s maybe the most important word. Is it the strongest? The one word that will truly last forever?

I lay there with the light on, watching the ceiling, feeling the old house breathing around me, hearing boards popping in the floors. I’ve got the door to the hallway open.

Am I in love with a ghost?

The Sunday service is tomorrow.

When I wake up, my mouth tastes like I’ve been using it to clean sidewalks. The cut on my forehead is throbbing and raw. Somebody raps on my door.

It’s Certain Certain. “What happened to your head, boy?” he says. “Witches been snatching at you all night? Looks nasty.”

I reach up and touch it. “Ran into something in the dark.”

“You ain’t been down in that cellar again, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, breakfast is ready, only you look a little green around the gills.”

“I’m all right. Hey, I want to go with you to the island today,” I say as we head downstairs. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“What you getting at, boy?”

“She’s real,” I say.

“The little blue dress gal? You still fussing with her?”

I stop on the stairs and turn to face him.

“I’ve
seen
her. I’ve
touched
her. She took me to the island last night.”

Certain Certain grins his lopsided grin. “In that storm? You sure you don’t need to go see a head doctor?”

“I don’t care if you believe me. I don’t care if you think I’m crazy. That doesn’t make it any less
true
.”

Tee Barlow asks about the cut on my forehead.

“Lightning been somnambulizing in his sleep,” Certain Certain says, winking at me. “Probably ran into a door.”

“Thanks
,” I whisper to him when we sit down to breakfast.

Faye Barlow comes in holding a little green jar. Her eyes look sad.

“Ronald Earl, here’s some calendula cream I can rub on your—”

“No, thank you, I’ll be fine.”

It hurts to cut her off this way, but I don’t want her touching me ever again. I think too much about the touching she did.
We did
. Does Lucy know? Can she see everything I do?

“Y’all ready?” Certain Certain says.

The outdoors has been washed fresh, and the sun is already burning the last of the mist off the lake. As we walk down to the pontoon boat, I take in long pulls of the clean air, blowing it out like it’s pulling the sickness out of me.

“Better get your business done now,” Certain Certain says, grinning. He jerks his thumb at two plastic King Johnnies standing in one end of the boat.

“Leviticus, chapter twenty-six, verse thirty-one,” Sugar Tom says. “‘And I will make your cities waste, and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours.’” He frowns when he doesn’t see me smiling. “Is there anything wrong, Ronald Earl?”

“No, sir,” I say, taking a seat upwind.

Nothing moves on the far shore. In the bright sunshine, what happened last night hardly seems possible. “Morning courage,” Certain Certain calls it. He chats with Tee Barlow about the stage.

Sugar Tom sits next to me and lights a Marlboro. The paper crackles when he takes a drag.

“When you get to be my age, Ronald Earl, you’re kind of on the edge of things. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes, sir. Well, I’m not sure, really.”

Sugar Tom taps the ash over the side. “When you’re this old, you’re not in the middle of things anymore. You do a lot of watching from the sidelines. It’s nature’s way. Moving us
off, making room for the young. Folks tend to forget about us, forget we’re still fully here. But we are. We think, we observe. We see plenty of things most folks don’t notice, all because we take the time to do so. We don’t have any choice.”

I watch the ashes swirl in the dark water, and think of Lucy. How any day she’s liable to just not be there anymore. The thought floods me with a kind of anger.

“What are you getting at?” I say.

“I’ve seen her, too,” Sugar Tom says.

I’m too surprised to speak.

“That little girl in the blue dress. I can’t recollect, what was her name?”

“Lucy,” I manage to say finally. “You’ve seen her?”

“Yes indeed. One morning I got up before everybody else, came out into the hall to use the bathroom, and there she was. Just as solid as a fence post.”

“What… what did you do?”

“Nothing. She drifted right up the other end of the hall and vanished. Never made a sound.”

“Did she … did she see you?”

“She didn’t act like she did.”

“When did it happen?”

Blue smoke rushes out of his nose. “The first morning we were here.”

“What! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t figure you needed to know, that’s all.”

I lean toward him, hoping my voice is covered up by the noise of the engine.

“Did you tell Certain Certain?”

“Why tell somebody about something who isn’t going to believe it until it happens to him?”

“But—we do that practically every day,” I say. “That’s what we do. Get people to believe in the Lord even though they can’t see Him.”

Sugar Tom exhales. “Did you know a granddaddy longlegs will eat the meat out of a walnut?”

“No. Well, I never really thought about it.”

“Well, they will. But if you want to watch them do it, it takes
time
. A whole lot of time and being very still. Most people can’t do that. Stay still for a long time. You find you an old logging road, pick a spot to sit down under a walnut tree. It might take an hour. It might take two. Maybe more. But when you watch long enough, they will come, you will see them. Do you believe me?”

“About the spiders? Sure.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because you told me. I believe you.”

Sugar Tom nods at Certain Certain. “See, Ronald Earl, it’s easy to believe things about spiders. Not so easy about other things. You have to be patient.”

“Shoot.”

“Now, don’t get disappointed. I’m just telling you I did see
her. I
know
I did. I believe you. That’s what I’m trying to say.
I believe you
.”

I pat him on the shoulder.
Lord
. Feels like nothing but bones underneath there.

“Thanks,” I say.

“For what?”

“For everything. Just—thanks.”