The Last Child (28 page)

Yoakum paused and Hunt imagined him stepping away from Katherine. “Since what?”

A door closed. Yoakum spoke in a whisper. “Since he’s out looking for a stone-cold killer.”

Johnny had to go two roads over to find the entrance to the abandoned tobacco farm. The gate was unlocked, the track overgrown with weeds and low brambles. Jack closed the gate behind them. He’d never been to the old barn. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.” Headlights cut into the darkness. Feathers of pine reached in and turned from black to green. Sap glistened on knotted trunks, then winked out as they passed.

They bounced through ruts and deep gouges made by spring rains. When they came out of the woods and into the abandoned fields, the sky opened above them: high, lonely stars and a trace of moon behind tissue clouds. “This was a plantation once,” Johnny said. “Then just a bunch of farms.” The track cut right, straightened, then split. Johnny went left. “You can still see where the big house burned.” He jerked his head. “Over there. Chimney stones in a pile. The old well shaft.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s overgrown now. I found it six months ago.”

The barn loomed ahead, a wall of grayed-out logs on a foundation of chiseled granite. Milkweed rose, pink and green, and fingers of ivy clawed up the length of the back corner. Black showed where chinking had crumbled to dust. Johnny pulled around to the other side and stopped. The doorway gaped. Charred wood and ash marked the fire pit. Johnny put the truck in park. “Give me the pack.” Jack shrugged it off. “Don’t turn off the engine until I say.” Johnny dropped the pack on the ground and pulled out the flashlight. He disappeared inside the barn, found the moldy blue backpack and three stubs of candle. “Alright,” he said.

Jack switched off the engine and the headlights winked out. The night collapsed to a twitching beam of light that flashed on white skin, wide eyes, and filthy clothes. “Ken’s house is that way.” Johnny pointed with the flashlight. “Through the trees. Not far.”

“How’d you find all this?”

Johnny squatted and dug the matches out of the pack. “Getting out of the house when things got bad. Looking for snakes.”

“About the snakes—”

“Hold this.” Johnny handed the light to Jack, then put the candles on a slab of granite and lit them. Jack watched and said nothing, but Johnny felt him there. “I’ve slept out here more than a few times. It’s not bad. Inside is full of spiders. Mosquitoes are worse out here.”

“I’ll take the mosquitoes.”

“Me, too.”

Jack put the light on the blue pack. “What’s that?”

“Let’s make a fire.” Johnny stood and began foraging for wood. Eventually, Jack helped him. They gathered twigs and fallen branches. The fire was still small when Jack found the scrap of Bible. It was pebbled leather, black; part of the spine, two inches long and charred. Some of the gold letters could still be seen. Jack held it for a long minute, and Johnny could tell that he knew what it was. He watched Jack’s tiny fingers trace the letters, then he stood, took it from him and threw it on the fire. Rocking back on his heels, Johnny watched his friend. Jack was not what most would call a good boy, but Johnny knew for a fact that he believed in the devil.

“I’m not going to burn in hell, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Jack’s small arm moved. He pointed at the fire. “What are you doing, Johnny?” His head shifted and red light filled up his eyes. “I’ve been good and I’ve been quiet. About all of this.” He moved his fingers over his face again. “What they said in the paper. The things you’ve been keeping secret from me. Snakes and charms and voodoo shit.” He shook his head. “But this ain’t right. Whatever this is, you can’t go burning Bibles. Even I know that.”

“It’s just a book.”

“You take that back.”

Johnny raised his voice. “It’s just a book and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t make a difference.” Jack’s mouth opened, but Johnny rode his words down. “The preacher said it would, but he was full of shit, too.”

“I think I might be sick.”

“Well, go over there if you’re going to do it.” Johnny stabbed a finger at the darkness. “I’m going to eat some dinner and I don’t need to be smelling your puke.”

Jack closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he looked better, less green. When he spoke, Johnny knew that he’d decided to let it go. “What’s that?” Jack asked, pointing at the pack.

An eddy of smoke wafted against Johnny’s face and he narrowed his eyes. “You really want to know?”

“I asked, didn’t I?”

Johnny unhooked the straps and dumped the contents of the bag on the ground. He separated the bundles of vegetation. There were four of them, each tied with string. He put them in a row, caught Jack’s eye and touched each in turn. “Cedar,” he said. “Pine. Spruce. Laurel.”

“Yeah. So?”

“They’re supposed to be sacred.” He touched them again, each in turn. “Wisdom. Strength. Courage. Perseverance. You’re supposed to burn them.”

“Is that an Indian thing?”

“Indian. Some other things.” Johnny scooped up the bundles and threw them into the darkness beyond the fire. They landed with a crunch, and Johnny spat on the dirt. “You hungry?” he asked. “I’m hungry.”

They ate peanut butter sandwiches and drank grape soda. Jack kept his eyes on his friend and looked away when Johnny caught him staring. Johnny ignored him. He didn’t want to talk about the things he’d done and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let Jack judge him. He wiped peanut butter fingers on his jeans and picked up the gun. It was heavy and smooth. He opened it up and saw that it was loaded.

“There’s no safety on that,” Jack said. “Careful where you point it.”

Johnny snapped the cylinder closed. “You know guns?”

Jack rolled his shoulders. “Dad’s a cop.”

“Can you shoot?”

“Straight enough, I guess.”

Johnny slipped the gun back into its holster. They fell into silence and night sounds rose up around them. Moths danced about the candle flames and their shadows licked the ground. Jack tossed his can into the fire to see if it would burn; paint blistered and burst. “Johnny?”

“Yeah.”

Jack kept his eyes on the fire. “Do you think cowardice is a sin?”

“Are you scared?”

“Do you think it’s a sin?” Insistent. Thin jaw clenched.

Johnny tossed his own can into the fire. Long seconds passed and he didn’t blink until he felt his eyes go bone dry. “That man at the river, David Wilson. He knew where my sister was. He knew, and I ran away before he could tell me.” Johnny looked at his friend. “So, yeah. I think cowardice is a sin.”

“God or no God.” Jack’s eyes were wide and still.

“That’s right.”

Jack stared into the dark and wrapped his arms around his knees. “What are we doing out here, Johnny?”

Johnny poked at the fire with a stick. “If I tell you, there’s no wimping out. No take-backs. So you need to tell me now if you’re in or out.”

“Hard to do if I don’t know what we’re talking about.”

Johnny lifted his shoulders. “I’ll take you home right now, but not if you know what I’m doing.”

“Jesus, Johnny. I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

“In or out?”

Across the fire, beyond the curtain of smoke and scorched air, Jack scrubbed a forearm across his nose. Orange glazed his eyes until he turned his head, then the color fell away and he was just a dirty boy with a washed-out tan and hair that stood out in all directions. “You’re pretty much all I have that’s good, Johnny. I don’t guess there’ll be any take-backs.” He turned back and his eyes were so simple and brown they made Johnny think of a dog’s eyes. “May as well tell me.”

“Come here.” Johnny dug into the pack from home. He pulled out the book on Raven County but did not open it. Jack came around the fire, sat in the dirt, and Johnny explained it from the beginning: David Wilson going off the bridge and what he’d said; Levi Freemantle, how he’d grabbed Johnny up by the river; the blood Johnny had found in Freemantle’s house.

Jack bobbed his head. “Dang, Johnny. That was in the papers, too. Same day as you. Not his name, I don’t think, but they found bodies in that house. Two people with their heads bashed in.”

“I kind of figured somebody was dead when I saw all the blood.”

Jack’s face scrunched up. “Was there a lot of it?”

“It was everywhere, and I mean like paint.”

The boys were silent for a minute.

Like paint
.

Then Jack shook his head. “I don’t understand what this has to do with us.”

Johnny clicked on the flashlight and opened the book to the page about Isaac Freemantle. He pointed at the map. “Here’s town.” He moved his finger north, made a circling motion. “This is mostly swamp.” He moved his finger slightly. “This is where the granite rises up and you have that huge stretch of woods where those old mines are. You remember?”

“Yeah. Fourth-grade field trip. They made us hold hands so nobody wandered off and fell into a hole.” He was embarrassed, Johnny knew, by the memory. Nobody had wanted to hold Jack’s bad hand. There had been pushing and shoving. Some girl had said it was gross.

Johnny traced his finger south, to the trail that ran beside the river. “This is where I ran into him, right about there. Over here is the bridge.”

“Got it.”

Johnny continued tracing the path along the river. His finger stopped near the edge of the swamp. There were two words there: Hush Arbor. “This is where he was going. This is where we’ll find him.”

“You’re talking over me, man.”

Johnny closed the book. “This goes back, okay. Back to slave times.”

“What?”

“Slave times. Concentrate. See, slaves came over with their own religions. African stuff. Tribal stuff. Animal gods and spirits in the water, fetishes, charms. Root work, they called it. Hoodoo. But that was good for the white folks, just fine, in fact, because nobody here wanted them learning about Jesus and God and stuff. They didn’t want a bunch of slaves thinking they were equal in the eyes of God. Do you see? If you’re equal, then nobody should own you. That was dangerous thinking if you owned slaves.”

“So, they didn’t want the slaves to learn.”

“But they did. African slaves, Indian slaves. They learned to read and they took to the Bible; but they had to do it in private, ’cause they understood the danger of it, too. They were smarter than the slave owners thought they were. They knew they’d be punished for their faith. Sold off. Killed, maybe. So they’d worship in the woods and in the swamps. Secret places. Hidden places. You see?”

“No.”

“Think of them as hiding places for church. They called these places “hush arbors,” and they’d go there to worship in secret, to hide their faith from the whites that didn’t want to share their religion.”

“Hush arbors? Like the place on the map.”

Johnny nodded. “They were too smart to build a church because they knew somebody would find it. But woods are just woods, a swamp is just mud and water and snakes and shit. So that’s where they’d go. They’d sing their songs to God, dance on the dirt, and testify to their new faith.”

“That’s in the book?”

Johnny looked away, hesitated. “Some of it. Not all of it.”

“Not all of what?”

“There was a slave named Isaac, who was a preacher of sorts. He taught those who couldn’t read. He spread the word, even though he knew the danger of it.” Johnny swatted a mosquito, rolled it off his neck and squeezed blood between thumb and fingertip. “They were discovered eventually, and three slaves were lynched right there in the hush arbor, strung up from the trees that made their church. They were going to hang Isaac, too, but his owner intervened. He stood the mob down with a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other. They say he called God down from the heavens and threatened to shoot the first man who took a step. Nobody had the courage to chance it. He saved that slave’s life.”

Jack was enthralled. “What happened next?”

“He took Isaac home and hid him for three weeks, waited for the mob to cool down, waited for some guilt to set in, I guess. Then he gave that slave his freedom, and he gave him the land where his people had worshipped.”

“And been lynched.”

“That, too.”

“And you want to find this guy there?”

“Isaac Freemantle lived there the rest of his life. Maybe Freemantles still do. The trail goes right to it. Probably how they got to town and back.”

Jack frowned. “How do you know all this? You say it’s not in the book.”

“My great-great-grandfather’s name was John Pendleton Merrimon. Same name as me.”

“Yeah. So?”

“He was the one with the gun and the Bible.” Johnny tossed a stick on the fire. “He’s the one that set Isaac free.”

“Get out.”

“Truth.”

“And you want to go out into the swamp, to find this guy’s great-grandson or whatever, a killer, so you can ask him about Alyssa?” Johnny nodded in absolute certainty, and Jack shook his head. “You think he owes you?”

“I don’t think he knows who I am.”

“You’re an idiot. I mean, you are off the fucking reservation.”

“Off the reservation.” Johnny’s voice was bitter. “That’s funny.”

“It’s not a joke. This is stupid, Johnny. It’s mental.”

“No take-backs. That’s what you said.”

Jack scrambled to his feet and sparks popped in the fire. “Jesus, Johnny. This guy just killed two people. He’ll kill us, too. Sure as shit.”

Johnny rose as well. “That’s why I took this.” He pulled Steve’s gun from the holster, and fire devils danced in the metal.

“You’re insane.”

“And you’re coming with me.”

Jack looked around, as if for help; but there was nothing there. Light pushed dark and the sky pressed down. Jack opened his hands and begged with his eyes. “It’s been a year, Johnny.”

“Don’t you say it!”

Jack swallowed, took a desperate look at the scrub beyond the fire; then he said it. “She’s fucking dead, man.”

Johnny swung with all he had. The blow struck the side of Jack’s face and he went down in the dirt. Johnny stood over him, his breath like glass in his throat, the gun a dead weight in his hand. For that instant, his oldest friend was not his friend, but his enemy; Johnny wondered why he’d ever thought that Jack could be more than that. Then he recognized the terror in his friend’s face.