The Covenant (10 page)

We hadn't gone far up the next hill when we started to hear the angry droning of chainsaws and grumbling of heavy engines. Deacon stopped again and set my case on the ground. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and toweled the back of his neck.

“Here's the old scuppernong arbor.” He walked toward a small but densely overgrown thicket of vines. “My workers found it this morning. It's original to the house, planted before the Civil War. They were about to chop it down when I stopped them.” Old muscadine covered in furry black bark, arched over to form a leafy cave against the hillside. I noticed something hanging just inside the entrance, something that moved as we drew near.

“There's a big damn bat in there,” I said.

“That's not a bat, he is
un rat de bois
—rat of the woods. Jackie Lyons, meet my guard possum, Paul. At night, he comes up to the house and wanders around the rooms.” Deacon stepped under the arbor and reached up to stroke the creature. It was hanging by its tail from a vine. At Deacon's touch, it opened its mouth and yawned, a nightmare of teeth.

“The Opossum Paul?” I asked.

“Do you think God will strike me dead?” He scratched the prehistoric monster between its ears. “He's his own little dude.”

We continued up the hill, and it wasn't long before I began to smell diesel smoke. The undergrowth suddenly gave way and the forest opened out on either side of the path. Before us rose the house, stripped of its kudzu mantle, lying naked and gray beneath the sun like a Greek ruin. A dozen men were busy tearing off the roof and jettisoning the rotted lumber over the side. More men were clearing undergrowth with chainsaws and sling blades, women and kids dragging briars up out of the woods to throw into the scoop of a bulldozer that sat idling on the slope of the hill. A pillar of gray smoke rose into the sky behind the house, somewhere beyond the trees.

“As soon as we get all this cleared out, we'll run new water, sewer, and gas lines up to the house.” Deacon set my case on the ground beside what appeared to be an old brick-paved drive or loop. The bricks were green with moss and nearly buried in the deep loam.

“Who are all these people?” I asked. There were dozens, and everywhere I turned I saw more. Several had noticed our arrival and raised their hands in greeting. Some dropped their work and headed our way.

Deacon spread his arms as though to embrace them all. “These are my saints, the congregation of my church. Most of them were scattered by the hurricane, but after Mrs. Ruth deeded us this property, I sent out word and they came. See how much we have already accomplished, with the Lord's help?”

The whole hillside had been transformed. It was already starting to look like a place where somebody could live—if you knocked down the house first. Without its veil of kudzu you could see just how close it was to collapsing upon itself.

We continued up the hill, now surrounded by a swarm of Deacon's saints, all crying his name in an apparent ecstasy of joy. Two took my camera case and carried it along. I counted half a dozen different languages in the first five minutes, a veritable Babel of Creole-speaking Cajuns, Asians, Mexicans, Jamaicans and Haitians.

A tottering old Vietnamese man came out of the house and called Deacon over to the porch. They huddled together and Deacon read something from the worn red-letter edition of the King James Bible that was always in his hand or his back pocket. Next, the children gathered, dangling from his arms like parrots. Now the women came and shyly took his hands and drew him away to where they were steaming tamales and boiling crawfish over open fires. They had set up a weird, circuslike encampment on the edge of the woods, rusting campers and tattered pop-ups and pickup trucks with camper shells, scores of dogs and chickens, goats staked out and bleating like tiger bait, and more half-naked children than anyone could count. They surrounded Deacon, dancing, clapping, kissing his hands and singing. He walked among them, his arms lifted as though riding a human wave.

I looked around until I found several Coleman coolers under a folding table. Deacon finally worked himself free of his followers and found me digging through the slushy ice. “Do you want a cold drink?” he asked.

I shook icy water from my hand. “Just wondering where you keep the Kool-Aid.”

 

13

G
RADERS AND BULLDOZERS
scraped the earth beyond Deacon's circus camp, leveling the hills and preparing a place where, in a few days, they would begin pouring the concrete foundations for his church. With a stick, he scratched out the plan in the dust for me: sanctuary, entrances, baptistery, offices, fellowship hall, food pantry, job-training school. I was anxious to start work in the house. Before he had a chance to give me the grand tour, I was rescued by the arrival of a flatbed truck bringing in another backhoe. Deacon hurried away to show them where to off-load.

I found my camera equipment next to a truck camper sitting up on concrete blocks. I squatted in the shade, lit a cigarette, watched the workers clearing the forest around the house. One in particular caught my eye. He was a young man, short and wiry, deeply sunburned across the back of his neck, dressed in dirty coveralls and yellow safety vest, a black cap that had nearly turned yellow with dust pulled down low over his eyes. The faded logo on his cap said GMPI. I watched him cross and recross the ground, like a man plowing a field with invisible mules, occasionally pausing to spray a line of orange paint on the dirt.

I finished my smoke, stamped it out. He wasn't using the normal electronic detection equipment for locating buried pipes and electrical lines. Instead, he carried a pair of thin brass divining rods in his fists, walking along with them held in front of his chest. Wherever his rods would cross, he'd stop, shift them to one hand and spray an orange arrow on the dirt with a sort of paint can on the end of a stick. Then he'd continue on, holding the rods loose so they could swing free in his hands.

His row brought him directly to me. He removed his cap and wiped the sweat from his face with a red bandanna as big as a pillowcase. “I wish I had known it was you there, Jackie,” he said without even looking at me. I'd known Trey for several years, but you couldn't really call us friends. In addition to being the call-before-you-dig man, he worked with Deiter at Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigations, using his dowsing rods to detect ectoplasmic residues and buried cables. Despite my own unique abilities in this sphere, Trey and I were not kindred spirits. Something about me jammed his frequencies. He tucked his handkerchief away and looked back along the line he'd just finished spraying, probably wondering if he needed to check it again owing to my psychic interference.

“I didn't think the house had water or gas,” I said.

“They's a big gas pipeline runs across this property.” He scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand and shoved his hat back on his head, revealing a stark, white forehead above the sunburn of his face. A couple of days' worth of faint, blond stubble speckled his cheeks. “You working construction now?” he asked.

“Photography. I'm shooting the house.”

“You been inside it yet?”

“Once.”

“Nice place, huh?”

Deacon returned from overseeing the unloading of the backhoe. “Everything OK?” he asked my friend.

Trey spit past me, a black gob that cratered the dust next to one of his orange lines. He wiped his mouth and took up his dowsing rods. “I want to show y'all somethin'. Foller me, 'bout five paces back, if you don't mind.” He started toward the house. After a moment's hesitation, we followed like a pair of dutiful wives. We entered the woods and Trey angled toward a thicket that Deacon's workers hadn't begun to clear. As he slowed, his dowsing rods swung together in front of his chest.

Deacon pulled his sunglasses from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Please don't tell me the pipeline runs down here. The plans didn't show anything in this area.”

“Pipeline's back yonder. This here is a tunnel,” Trey said.

Deacon opened his eyes and blinked. “A tunnel?”

“Rods don't lie, man.” Trey spit again and scuffed it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Leads from the house off into the woods there. That's how I know it's a tunnel. Ain't no gas, water, or sewer lines into that house, and the electricity used to come in on a pole. Only thing it could be is a tunnel.”

I wondered if Trey's employers knew he was using hillbilly magic to guarantee the safety of that gas pipeline. Deacon must have been thinking the same thing. “I thought you usually used some kind of machine to detect buried pipes.”

“Got a Dynatel back in the truck. Already tried it. Won't work on this hill.” He clicked the rods together. “I figured something was interfering, so I got out my rods. First thing I found was water. It's all up under here.”

Trey shifted his chew around in his jaw, his eyes wandering all over the house and the trees surrounding it. “Sometimes these old houses have their well down in the cellar. When this house was built, they probably still had trouble with Indians. I bet if you tore the walls down to the original timbers, you'd find loopholes for shooting.”

Deacon's face lit up at the thought of all that history, buried and hidden for who knew how many years. He slid his sunglasses back on to his nose to free his hands for talking. “The house was built in 1858. Legend says it was a dead end on the underground railroad. Escaped slaves would crawl into the cellar through ventilation holes in the back. But those who made it here never got any farther north. The strongest were disfigured and resold into slavery, the old murdered, but the women and children just disappeared.”

“Seriously?” I asked.

Deacon shrugged. “That's the family legend. You know how legends are. Infant mortality was extremely high, and women died all the time while giving birth. In that time, families would lose two or three children before the age of ten. For slaves it was even higher. Men would go through two, three, sometimes four wives.”

“It ain't never a good idea to build a house over a well.” Trey was still stuck on whatever was bothering him about the house. “Sometimes a well can be a kind of gate into the spirit world, or hell, whatever you want to call it.”

Deacon said, “I've been all over this house a hundred times and I've never seen any sign of a tunnel or a well.”

“Preacher, they is things about this house you won't see if you go over it a thousand times, not unless you got eyes to see them. I can find hidden things with my dowsing rods. And Jackie here can see them with her nekkid eyes.”

I couldn't tell what Deacon was thinking behind his sunglasses, couldn't see if he was looking at me or had even heard what Trey had said. I hoped not. It would only remind him about that day on the levee. But he was looking at something quite far away.

Trey cleared his throat and said, “Well, them lines ain't gonna paint theyselves.”

Deacon smiled and shook his hand. “Thank you for your help. I'll only keep you from your work another moment. A minute ago, you said the first thing you found was water. Then you found the tunnel. What else did you find?”

Trey shifted uncomfortably, his small hand gripped tightly in Deacon's paw. “I can't say for sure,” he mumbled.

“What can you say for sure?”

Trey started to spit, then thought better of it. He shifted his wad of tobacco to his other cheek. “I'll tell you this, preacher. I wouldn't walk them woods after dark, not for any money.”

Deacon nodded, released him and strolled off in the other direction, smiling and mumbling to himself. “I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfortest me.” Soon he was pulled in a hundred directions by his people, all demanding his attention. Trey hurried back to his work, vanishing into the crowd without a backward glance at me.

It seemed everybody was looking for something they couldn't find. I wondered if I could find someone to help me move my equipment into the house.

 

14

I
SET UP MY LIGHTS AND TRIPOD
in the foyer. The tiny old Vietnamese man I'd seen earlier helped me string a power cord into the house from the circus camp. I shot everything, every inch of wall as high as eye level, with closer studies of any bit of trim or ornamentation I could find. Dust sifted down the whole time, workers moved in and out of my frame as though I wasn't there, shifting furniture, bringing in lumber and stacking it along the walls, forcing me to pause, move, set up again and repeat the same shots. I must have worked three hours just covering two walls and not once did I see the preacher.

When I started, I hadn't the first clue what I was supposed to be doing. After those first three hours, I didn't feel much smarter, but at least I had some shots to show for my time and maybe get a little bit of an advance on my pay.

It must have been siesta time, because they had stopped working on the roof. I only noticed because the blizzard of dust had changed to more of a flurry, with occasional sleets of loose plaster. I shook the rubble from my shoulders and continued to shoot. Other than the clicking of the camera's shutter, the silence went on and on, and I found myself stopping more and more often to listen to it.

I had put Deiter's earlier warning and Trey's half-spoken fears from my mind. Very little about the dead could frighten me anymore. I'd been seeing what you would call ghosts for most of my life. I hadn't always dealt with them very well—in fact, they'd nearly killed me more than once. Not directly. Just their being there, visible, but only to me. It wasn't everybody who could maintain being in both worlds at the same time, having to keep a sane face while you're questioning some john about what happened to his hooker, listening to his lies while she's standing there the whole time, bleeding on the rug, looking at her own brains slipping down the wall.