November Mourns (28 page)

The grave had been shallow to begin with. It looked like a runoff of rain edged down the grade toward the river and had eroded a wide track of soil.

The forehead and eyes of the man were still covered with dirt, but his nose and chin were now exposed. A few plumes of hair stuck up like brown weeds. Most of the flesh was gone and his jaws had been pried open by animals going after the tongue.

So, there’s Jimmy Ray Lusk.

Shad turned to say something but the kid had vanished into the brush. From the corner of his eye he spotted Tandy Mae, carrying one of her brood, coming straight for him. Was he supposed to run? Was she going to shoot him in the head for discovering the body?

He stood his ground for no other reason than inertia. Where was he going to go?

The baby was wrapped tightly in a blanket and from what Shad could see, it only had two small holes where its ears should be.

Glancing down, Tandy Mae said, “I killed him.”

“I figured that part.”

“With his own gun. Then I tossed him in the truck and drove him down here.”

“I see. Any particular reason why you did it?” Not that anybody needed one.

That closed-up face opened just a little. “He wanted to stop.”

His thoughts were ahead of him. He knew what she meant but couldn’t help but repeat the word. “Stop?”

“Stop giving me children,” she explained.

You didn’t have a dialogue with someone like this, he knew, about things like this, but he couldn’t quit so far in. He sounded a touch more weary than he actually felt. “Why did you want even more?”

“You didn’t notice, did you?”

“I guess not.”

“They’re boys,” she said. “All my babies. They’re boys. I wanted another girl. I wouldn’t let him stop until he gave me a girl.”

“But why did you want a girl so badly?”

She frowned and touched her forehead with her free hand, like somebody was knocking from the other side of her skull. “I needed to make up for leaving Megan behind.”

It made no sense. “But you were talking to her again, after all those years.”

“I’d already done it by then.”

The infant threw the bottle on the ground. Shad stooped with a grunt, picked it up, and the cutting, familiar smell hit him. He squirted a few drops of the bottle’s contents into his palm and saw that the liquid was clear. He dipped the tip of his tongue into it.

She was giving the babies moon.

He stared at her with a mix of regret, hopelessness, and indifference.

“It’s the only thing that will get them quiet,” she told him. “This child I’m holding is deaf and mute and got no knees. You think you could live like that without some make-liquor to hold you over?”

“No,” he whispered.

“You gonna tell the police about this?”

“No,” he said. If Sheriff Increase Wintel put her in jail, who in the hell would take care of all the ill children?

“I didn’t think so. You don’t even sound upset. Do me a favor then and cover up Jimmy Ray’s nose. He always had such a big goddamn nose, I should’ve cut it off first.”

Tandy Mae trudged off with the kid in her arms. The pumpkin-headed boy slipped out of the brush and started kicking flowers and leaves over his dead father’s nose. Shad stood there in silence for a while, then wandered off, trembling. The little tap of moon he’d taken had given him a bad thirst for it.

There were sticker bushes on the shore. Where a young girl might scratch her cheek before lying back to sleep or to daydream, to cry or fret or hum to herself. Where she could be with a man, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the last.

His toe scuffed over a hump in the dirt.

The things you went and tripped over. You never knew what you were going to find.

It was a beer bottle, half-buried in the mud.

He pulled it out and saw a piece of paper stuffed inside.

Shad smashed the glass against a rock, plucked through the shards and found that the paper had been perfectly folded into quarters.

He opened it and read:

Glad to see you’re okay

Chapter Eighteen

TANDY MAE PACKED UP THE WHOLE BROOD OF
ill children in her truck and drove Shad back to Mrs. Rhyerson’s boardinghouse. He lay on his back, in his room, waiting for the end to find him.

It wouldn’t be long. He’d pulled at all the threads he could find, and gone into the hills, and now whatever was up there had to come down to town. He knew it would happen but he was getting sick of waiting.

With moonlight tracked across his brow, Shad awoke naked on his feet, standing at the side of the bed with a woman seated next to him, her open hand on his back. For an instant he thought it was Jerilyn. And then her sister. Even as he stared and shook off the feeling, he nearly spoke Rebi’s name. He was still panting, and his sweat plied down across the vivid partially healed wounds on his belly.

She leaned up on her knees and embraced him from behind, shimmering in the silver radiance of the room. The glass pane was coated with a trace of ice, and the shadows of frosted patterns wheeled against the far wall.

There was a remote sense of dissatisfaction within him. As if he had not yet completed the chore set before him. It was the kind of feeling you got used to after a while.

Elfie Danforth nodded down at him, gave him a flicker of that devastating smile, and Shad felt himself curl up and roll over inside. That rough tickle started working through his chest.

“What are you doing here, Elf?”

“The hell kind of question is that to ask me?”

A foolish one. You had to work with what was given to you.

Her shoulder-length blond hair caught in the breeze and came after him in a tangle. He wanted to run his palms along the angle of her nose, around the sharp jut of her chin. She grinned and it crinkled her eyes.

“I told you,” she said, joking, trying to play around some, “that you were a stupid man.”

“As I recall, I didn’t argue with you.”

“I’m glad you’re talking to me again. I hate when you’re silent. You’re such a difficult person to love.”

And here he was thinking he was so easy to get along with.

“I don’t mean to be,” he said.

“I know that.” She took his face in her hands and drew him to her and she held him like that for a time. “Did you find out what happened up on Gospel Trail? Do you know how Megan died?”

“No.”

“So you’re going to keep looking.”

“No, I think I’ve done about all I can do.”

“Are you leaving?”

“No, I’m going to stay.”

“For a while?”

She tried to keep some hope lit inside, believing that he would achieve something in this world, manage to take her with him despite their past, the baby, everything else.

“Yes, only for a while.”

And there it was, the smile that opened him wide.

She entwined herself around him as tightly as she could and forced him inside her, pulling him deeper, holding him there and clinging even tighter, until some of his wounds began to open. This wasn’t for pleasure or even love. She wanted a child to make up for the one they’d lost. The same way Tandy Mae had wanted a girl to make up for losing Megan. His blood spattered between them.

Afterwards, when she finally released him, Shad fell back on the mattress and wondered if he could’ve gotten away from the hollow if only his father hadn’t called him in prison.

Elfie rubbed her thumb over his knuckles—the nail a heavy cream color in the darkness, and filed very smooth—back and forth just like all the times before, patting him like,
Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.

She leaned in to kiss him and her lips were cold, but no colder than his own.

AT DAWN, SHAD HEARD DRUNKEN LAUGHTER OUT IN
the brush behind the house and followed the sound. Jake Hapgood squatted beside Becka Dudlow on a tree stump with his hand inside her blouse, stoned out of his mind on meth and moon.

Becka turned her angry teeth on him and started nibbling at his chin, raising tiny welts on his skin. Jake didn’t notice. His hair hung down in his eyes and he tilted his head at Shad without focusing on him. A loose, malicious titter eased from Jake’s throat and kept going on and on, as if he couldn’t stop laughing at himself, couldn’t fully believe he was here. All the slickness was gone.

Shad grabbed Jake by the chin and squeezed hard enough to feel the loose teeth inside his friend’s jaw about to give way in their sick gums. It didn’t surprise him much. The moon gets us all in the end.

He moved a step off and felt a gun barrel pressing into his back.

Preacher Dudlow stood behind him, one hand over his mammoth belly and the other holding the .38 very firmly. No gloves this time, but the man was still sucking at the edges of his mustache.

Well now,
Shad thought.

He figured the reverend wasn’t there for him, so he just slid out of the way to the left a little until the barrel was pointing at Becka on the stump. Jake’s hand continued to work vigorously at one breast.

Dudlow didn’t have a coat on but still wore his bright red hunter’s cap with the flaps down over his ears. The knitted scarf his mother had made remained wrapped twice around his throat and trailing over his shoulders, down to his ankles. The aroma of Mrs. Swoozie’s boysenberry pie wafted off Dudlow’s chin.

“We all have our temptations,” Shad said, referencing their last conversation at Megan’s and Mama’s graves. When you threw somebody’s own words back at them they hit much harder than anything you could come up with on your own.

“So true,” Dudlow answered.

Shad tried to remember how it went. “So human of us. It’s a divine test. We’re fated to quarrel with our flaws.”

“I’ve quit fighting,” Dudlow said. “Are you going to try to stop me from what I’m about to do?”

“No,” Shad said, a little surprised at himself. But it was the truth.

“You know where she goes? What she’s been doing?”

“Yes.”

Dudlow pulled a face, showing his purple tongue. “It’s disgraceful. Disgusting. All my fault. I didn’t keep to my own house!”

“Then you can’t blame her completely.”

“No, no, you’re right. You’re quite right about that, yes indeed.”

He handled the gun too easily, without any respect. He turned it one way and the other, as if he was going to hold it up to his eye, peer into it, start thumbing the hammer back—click, click, click . . . bang! Turn this all into a stupid gag from a French farce. Like he’d wind up with ash on his face, a little cut on his nose, everybody giggling.

Dudlow shifted from foot to foot, sometimes catching the ends of the scarf under his heels.

Shad said, “You told me you weren’t a fool. You said you took your responsibilities in safeguarding your congregation very seriously.”

“I do. I thought—” His mouth worked impotently, and he started bending his knees like a child about to break into a wail.

When it got bad, you always wanted to drop and call for Mama.

“What did you think, Reverend?”

“I thought it would be you.”

“Me?”

“That you were the one primed and set to go off, Shad Jenkins. That you were going to kill and take some of us to hell with you.”

“The only one I want is whoever killed my sister.”

“So you say.”

“We all have our frustrations. Maybe you just need to be a touch more forgiving.”

“Actually, I believe I may prefer being a martyr too much. I’ve known about this for a time, but—I was trapped by my own pride. By the burden of my cross. Of her, my wife.”

“That’s why it’s called a burden, because you have to carry it.”

Jake must’ve pinched a serious amount of Becka’s flesh because she let out a bizarre little yeep noise at that moment and her eyes cleared for an instant. She saw her husband standing there, the pistol trained on her, and an expression of solace filled her face. Dudlow saw it and let loose with a whimper and held the .38 out straight at her face.