The Covenant (32 page)

He reached across the mattress and picked up a piece of paper from the floor. “Not all my enemies are supernatural, nor have all my saints abandoned me in fear of the dead. Many have been arrested by Roy Stegall for immigration violations. Others have been harassed and attacked. I have received threatening letters in the mail. And then there was this.” He tossed the paper into my lap. “Luther Vardry's restraining order, stopping all work on the house while he challenges Ruth's will in court.”

“What's he challenging?”

“Everything. Ruth didn't just give me this land and the money to build my church. She left me everything, her entire estate, donated to the church. Luther got nothing.”

“Did you know?”

He shook his head. “I don't understand why she has done this, but I have to stop work until it gets out of probate.” He sounded defeated already.

“Ruth wouldn't have signed that will unless it was bulletproof. Luther can challenge it, but he can't win.”

“Even if he doesn't win, he can bury it in court for years.”

“Let him. You're younger than he is. He won't live forever.”

“He's Ruth's son, a Stirling. He could live another twenty years, easy.”

“But aren't you going to fight? You've got the money.”

He tossed his wine back with one smooth swallow and set the plastic cup carefully on the floor beside the bed. “Money, yes, I have money, but even in Malvern money isn't everything. This is Luther Vardry's county. He's got the biggest, wealthiest church around and all the power, influence and money that position brings. He's pastor to all the judges. He owns a United States senator. He doesn't want the True Gospel cutting into his take.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing from this brave, strong, fearless Christian warrior, this man who had battled demons and spent his lonely vigil in the Gethsemane Garden of his soul. Luther Vardry's unassailable power was the best reason to fight, not give up and blow away.

Deacon continued despondently, “I offered to give Luther everything else, if he would let me keep the property, plus enough money to restore the house and build the church. He refused. I don't blame him. I don't know what got into me, preaching that way in his church at Ruth's funeral. Pride, I suppose, that old demon. I get so high on it, I can't stop myself. I didn't even follow Ruth's wishes. She wanted me to preach the story of Lot, but I barely touched on it. All I wanted to do was jab a shiv in that old preacher. I guess I succeeded. He won't even talk to me now except through his lawyer.”

“Screw him then. You'll own him in court. I know a lawyer who would take your case just for the pleasure of sticking it to a guy like Luther Vardry.”

He took my hands and pressed them between his, trying to get me to understand. “I can't beat him, Jackie. Ruth died before our church was built. She was the only thing standing between me and Luther. You, of all people, should know you can't go against the government in a small town, not unless you've got a bigger government on your side.”

“But you can't give up.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that.” His demeanor was so disgustingly Christlike, I could almost see the bloody holes in his hands. “I hope you never give up, never stop fighting.” He leaned forward and kissed me, once, on each cheek.

*   *   *

We lay together, sharing a cigarette, which was my second favorite thing to do in bed. I blew a couple of weak smoke rings, which made me cough. Deacon took the cigarette from my fingers and flicked the ash onto the floor. “Even if Ruth had lived, I wonder if the church would ever have been built. Very little was getting done.”

“It's a wonder Mrs. Ruth could stay here alone all those years,” I said.

I rolled over on top of him and took the cigarette, inhaled one last drag, and dropped it into the empty wine bottle. He reached up to me, cupping my head with one hand while I leaned down and forward, my hair falling down around my face and framing his.

Deacon closed his eyes. I paused, hearing a scream outside. The stained-glass window at the far end of the room shattered and suddenly the room was full of fire. Flames leapt up over the mattress and ignited the blankets. We threw them off and rolled into the hall. The window behind us shattered and fire surrounded us again.

We made it to the front door but the front porch was an inferno. The dining room boiled with smoke and hellish light, its exit the mouth of hell. Flames came tumbling down the stairs like children on Christmas morning. Two-hundred-year-old Zuber wallpaper curled and turned to ash just from the heat. Every doorway was a sheet of fire, and black smoke drew down around us like a curtain. “The tunnel!” Deacon shouted over the roar of the fire. I don't know where he got the air to breathe.

We headed for the basement, slipped and fell halfway down the steps, ended in a heap against one wall. The bricks were cool and the air breathable, but there were already gaps of flickering light showing through the boards above our heads. Deacon grabbed a flashlight one of the plumbers had left behind and we dove through the jagged entrance he had knocked through the cellar wall.

I snatched the flashlight from his hand and clicked it on, grabbed his arm and started to pull him down the passage. He jerked free and said, “Wait.”

Someone was upstairs, inside the burning house. She was screaming Deacon's name.

“That sounds like Holly.”

Deacon? Deacon, where are you?

“What's she doing here?”

“She must have seen the flames.” He hurried back to the cellar and shouted up the stairs, “Holly! Down here!”

Deacon! Oh my God! Deacon help me!

“How did she get in the house?” I asked.

He started up the steps. I remembered the voice of Reece Loftin calling out to me and Lorio, that night on the levee. I remembered her voice behind me on the bed. I remembered the little girl and the dark shape that tricked me into the dusty tomb at the other end of this tunnel and locked me in. I grabbed his arm. “Deacon, don't go. It's not her.”

“I have to go.”

“It's them. The voices in the forest.”

Deacon! Please, where are you?

“Jackie, I have to go,” he said.

“But it's not Holly!”

“If there's even a chance.” Glowing cinders drifted down the stairs as the house groaned and cracked. The upper floors were collapsing. “I can't just let her die.”

“I'll go with you.” I looked around for a fire extinguisher but the place had been stripped bare.

“I have to go back and try to save her. You owe nothing to Holly.”

“What about me, Deacon? If you go back, who is going to save me?”

He looked down at me, his face shining like Moses on the mountain, but it was only the glow of the fire surrounding his head. “You have already saved yourself, Jackie Lyons. Now go.” He shook loose of my grasp and disappeared up the stairs.

I waited for him until burning timbers were falling into the cellar. I couldn't see for the smoke, couldn't hear for the dying shrieks of the house as it was consumed in flame. Deacon had made his decision. I had made mine. He was the only thing that mattered to me, the only reason I had to be there. Not the work, not the job or the camera or the pictures, not even justice for a murdered man. Just him, and without him, there was nothing. I closed my eyes against the stinging smoke and waited.

Then I felt his strong hand in mine, dragging me away into darkness and into air I could breathe. I didn't know how he made it out. “Did you find her?” I gasped. He didn't answer, just pulled me along. A hot wind choked with ash and cinders carried us down the tunnel and we emerged into the crypt as though spat out of hell itself. As I collapsed against the wall, I felt his hand slip from mine. It was a few minutes before I could even see, but I knew he was gone. I'd felt his hand, felt his strength drag me forward when I would have lain down and died, and I knew he'd never been there. He was still in the house, looking for someone or something he would never find.

The gate of the crypt was locked. I sat with my face against the bars, swallowing sips of air while smoke poured out around me, watching the house burn in the night and collapse and then transform into a whirlwind of fire that lifted up and up, covering the sky, while in the distance futile sirens screamed their aching slow progress through wood and field only to watch it burn from a safe distance, helpless to stop it, miles from the nearest hydrant.

It reminded me of something I had forgotten, buried most of my life, only now to recall in stupefying clarity. I remembered the first time I saw a ghost. I must have been four or five years old. The terror of that vision was my earliest clear memory of anything.

It was Christmas and we were staying with my mother's sister, who lived in Mountain Home, Arkansas. I was looking out an upstairs window when I saw a man standing next to the mailbox by the road. Somehow I knew he was dead. I screamed and screamed, but when they pulled me away from the window, they couldn't see him. They thought I was having a fit (later they would take me to the doctor, but this was an ill that had no cure).

They put me to bed in my aunt's bedroom and later that night she came in to talk to me. She asked me about the man and I described him—short, thin and dark, wearing a hospital gown. She nodded and said,
Yes, that's him
, without ever explaining what she meant. She lay down beside me in the dark and fell asleep holding my hand, and during the night she woke me up, pulling me out of bed because the house was on fire. I watched my father and uncle carry the furniture out of the house while the upper story burned, ashes and cinders falling like snowflakes all around and setting little fires in the dry grass. We made a game of stomping them out.

There was nobody to carry furniture out of Deacon's house. There was no furniture to carry, nothing worth saving. Priceless, two-hundred-year-old chestnut beams and planks and molding, dry as snake's breath, burned like fireworks.

During the night, the Opossum Paul crawled through the bars and curled up in my lap. As dry as the summer had been and as hot as the fire had burned, somehow it didn't spread into the woods, probably because Deacon had cleared all the underbrush from around the house. Otherwise the whole forest might have gone up and saved Luther the trouble of bulldozing it. Otherwise, Paul and I would have been baked like blackbirds in a crypt with the bones of Luther's forgotten ancestors.

 

45

A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down.

—C
HARLES
D
ICKENS,
A T
ALE OF
T
WO
C
ITIES

H
OLLY DISCOVERED ME AROUND
nine o'clock the next morning. I don't know how. She was clutching a blanket as though she knew just where to find me. “Oh Jacqueline,” she cried when she saw me, speaking with that soft French “J” that sounded so beautiful and yet so full of despair. She passed the blanket through the bars of the gate.

They couldn't get fire trucks close enough to the house to put out the fire. They didn't have hoses long enough to reach the hydrants on the highway. Senator Mickelson had funneled ten million dollars through Congress to build a paramilitary force to guard his gated mansion, while the county was still relying on volunteer firefighters driving thirty-year-old secondhand trucks. Rescuing me from the crypt finally gave them something to do. Holly led them to me. I recognized some of the firemen from last April, when they came to fish Sam Loftin's body from the lake. They recognized me, too, but we didn't hug.

Luther brought the key, unlocked the gate and rolled back the stone. Holly helped me through the woods back to Jenny's house. She hugged me close, her arm tight around my shoulders. “Now you and me are just alike,” she said. “We have both gone through fire and been resurrected.”

It wasn't even August yet. The grass was dead and brown, but the lawn services were out mowing the levee anyway, throwing up clouds of choking red dust. Jenny met us at the door of her house, folded me into her arms and held on, rocking and moaning. Holly guided us inside and into the kitchen, where she attempted to prepare breakfast as though nothing in the world was wrong. She poured me a cup of coffee and put the cup in the refrigerator and set the hot coffee carafe on the table. Then she cracked three eggs into the sink before she knew what she was doing. She stood there looking at the eggs in the sink. “Oh Lord. Look what I done.” She tried to laugh, but it was more of a whimper. She washed the eggs down the drain, then picked the shells out and tossed them in the garbage. Cassie sat by the fireplace and cried.

Everybody was a wreck except me.

Later in the day the fire marshal stopped by with Sheriff Stegall to interview me. It was just a routine procedure, he assured me, but an investigation was required since the fire had resulted in a fatality. According to me, anyway. They hadn't found a body yet. “We're still looking,” he said as he patted my hand.

I didn't know men still looked like Fred Mertz. He wore his fireman's coveralls with big strapping suspenders stretched crosswise over his belly, a smear of soot across the bridge of his nose and up the outside of his right forearm to his elbow.

Jenny and I hadn't talked yet. I hadn't told her what happened. It was too soon. She asked the fire marshal if he had any idea how the fire started. “Well,” he growled in a friendly way, “that old house, it just went up like a box of matches. But it's been my experience, thirty years putting out fires in this county, that when you have a fire starting late at night upstairs, it's usually somebody smoking in bed.” He shot me a quick side-eye that said,
Ain't that right, Ethel?