The World Ends In Hickory Hollow (6 page)

"Curt
Londown
," the man greeted us. "Wife Cheri. We're doing fine, and we don't need a thing. Good of you to come by, but there's not a bit of good your wasting your time here."

Mom Allie can handle any situation ever conceived by God or man. She managed to engage the taciturn couple in conversation for a full five minutes. I said nothing, just used my eyes, and at the end of our very short visit, I knew that they were probably well-fixed for foodstuff, had plenty of fuel cut and stored dry, were preparing for crops in the spring, and were terribly afraid of something. Wariness fairly popped from the pores of both the adults.

I also discovered that Carl had met us with a small .32 pistol in his jacket pocket. As I looked down at him from the wagon seat, I could see its distinctive shape in the pocket of his jacket. As the other pocket bulged just as much, its weight hadn't called attention to itself. Who notices a boy's loaded-down pockets, anyway?

The discovery filled me with a foreboding that I hadn't known until now. What could have made a healthy, well-equipped young family so cautious–unless some danger was abroad, some immediate, here-and-now danger, unconnected with fallout and such?

As we turned the wagon and headed back the way we had come, I felt the weight of my own pistol lying against my thigh in my jacket pocket and was glad, now, that Zack had insisted that I bring it. And when we reached the river track again and turned to go farther along it, I got out and ranged ahead, as if I were merely stretching my legs.

The next lane had been used frequently, we could all see, but was now drifted over with dead leaves and
sweetgum
balls. I looked back at Mom Allie, and she looked at Lantana, who nodded.

"The Sweetbriers lives up here, if I don't misremember. Old folks, most as old as me. Their folks been on that place since heck was a pup. If they're there, they'll be mighty glad to see somebody, I know," she said.

Maud was, by now, weary of her new duty and ready to turn and go home. I took her by the cheek strap and led her into the track, and we meandered through yet another stretch of wood-land. Around the first bend, we found our way sloping steeply to climb a sharp ridge that was lined with venerable hickory trees. Crossing over, we found ourselves in clean-floored pine woods ... big woods, such as I had thought to be gone forever in the wake of the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers.

Lantana looked up into the whispering roof far above us. "I see they never sold their timber stand," she mused. "They love these old trees. Went hungry,
many's
the time, but they wouldn't sell '
em
. Down here, so far away from a road and so close to their house, nobody could get in to steal '
em
. So here hey be, still straight and tall and
talkin
' to the wind. And all the lumber companies and the pulpwood haulers and the paper mills are gone a-
gallagin
'."

We moved among the giant trees, even Maud's
hoofbeats
muffled to quiet by the carpet of needles that lay thickly on the forest floor. Then we saw watery blue sky before us and came out into a narrow field that separated the pine wood from the garden fence of a small gray house that huddled among leafless chinaberry trees. There was no smoke.

Lucas pulled Maud up before the barbed-wire gate of the garden, and we all, moved by some strange instinct, went together into the heavily mulched rows, picking our way across to the yard gate. That stood open, and as we went through it, a small gray-brown form came trotting around the corner of the house bleating joyfully. It was a Nubian doe, and her narrow face was alight with greeting.

She nuzzled at our hands as we followed the sand path around the house to the back porch. It was a screened enclosure containing a washer and a chest-type deep freezer. The door was unlatched, and we found the door into the kitchen unlocked–violently unlocked. Something had torn the door away from its own locking mechanism, splintering the door facing as well.

I shivered, and Lantana laid her hand on my shoulder for a moment as I nerved myself to step inside. The kitchen had been ransacked. Cupboard doors had been left open, and broken glass, pots and pans, dishes, and loose flour lay in drifts across the bright linoleum. No sane person, scrounging for food, had done this. Pointless destruction had been the rule here.

Into the hush that followed our entry, there came a moan. That released us from our shock, and Lucas moved quickly into the next room through the swinging door at his right. A very old woman lay propped against a leg of the dining table. She had pulled the bright cotton tablecloth down and covered herself with it against the cold, but she was almost blue with chill, as well as with loss of blood.

Her short white hair was matted with dark clotting across the left side of her head, and the stroke that had split her scalp had closed her left eye with a purple swelling the size of a tennis ball. She had just enough consciousness left to know that someone had come and to let us know that she was there.

"See ... to ... Jess," she whispered as Lantana lifted her against her shoulder, comforting her as if she were a child.

Lucas took a knife from the kitchen, and I checked the load in my pistol. Then we moved into the living room, which adjoined the dining room. There was nobody there, so we went across it, down a short hall, and into a bedroom.

Jess was there. He had been beaten to death with his own walking cane.

The room was smeared and spattered with blood from wall to wall. Even the ceiling had dark brown drops across it in an arc, where the fouled cane had been swung high and down, scattering blood in its wake.

Lucas knelt beside the dead man and felt his cheek, flexed one of the hands. The gaunt old fellow was as calm as any doctor could have been as he rose and said, "He's been dead most two days. I've seen a lot of dead men, child. I was in the war. But she's been
lyin
' out there in the cold and losing blood for entirely too long. We've got to get her warm, then take her home with us. Nobody can stay here, even if it might be safe to. Somebody mighty ornery is in those woods."

"Now we know what the
Londowns
were so antsy about," I said. "They must have had a run-in with whoever did this ... or could there be two batches of madmen running up and down the river or the road?"

"Unlikely," he said, turning back to the dining room. " Let's look on the bright side. Let's say there's only one crew of murderers loose around here."

In the short time we had been gone, Lantana had swept the worst of the debris out the kitchen door, and Mom Allie had lit a fire in the
cookstove
, rescued a kettle from the battered utensils, and set it full of water from the rain barrel. The bottled gas burned blue under its copper bottom, and it looked unnatural to me after the four years I had spent using wood to cook with.

We brought a mattress from the second bedroom, which had been disordered but not destroyed as the other had been. With the blankets Lucas found in the quilt box beneath the kitchen windows, we made Mrs. Sweetbrier comfortable on the floor near the heater. As the iron grew warm, her color improved, and I blessed the big woodpile that had enabled Lantana to get a fire going in the potbellied heater so quickly.

A canister of tea had been heaved out the back door and lay, still tight-lidded, on the entry porch. We made tea in a fruit jar, strong and hot, and Lantana found enough sugar spilled on the counter to make it very sweet. With this warming brew inside her the old lady revived quickly.

One glance around her kitchen made her moan again, but she forgot the destruction when she looked up at me. "Jess?" she breathed.

I've seldom felt so rotten. "He didn't make it," I told her. "He's in the bedroom. In a little, we'll bury him, if you'll tell us where he'd have liked to be put. You'll come home with us, and we'll take care of you, if you'll go."

It wasn't soothing or comforting or even tactful, but at the moment it was all I could come up with. I kept thinking about our long ride back through the woods that would be getting dark in another two hours. I was in a hurry. She, more than anyone, could sense the reason for that.

"Yes. Of course," she said quietly. "I knew, really, that he was dead, or he would have come looking for me. He'd like to be by the garden gate, under the big chinaberry with the rose vine up it. Then we'll go. It's getting late, from the look of the sky."

It was a quick and simple funeral, the only one that I knew of during that entire death-filled time. Lucas, Mom Allie, and I took turns with a shovel from the garage, and though the grave we dug was shallow, we covered it over with heavy rocks from a pile by the fence, once Jess Sweetbrier was in it. Lantana knew the right words to say, and we all stood in the pale late-afternoon sunlight as she spoke.

"Lord, you've seen fit to give the world a new start. We all know that that means hardship and suffering for us and for ours. Our friend Jess has been spared the tribulations that we must still face. Welcome him to heaven, Jesus, and guide our way as we go."

We found our patient lying still and pale, but she looked up as we came in and said, "Our car is in the garage. If they didn't ruin it, it should run ... the battery was new last summer. We could go by the road and miss the woods entirely."

I looked at Mom Allie. She nodded. "You don't need to take a long, cold ride behind a mule, for sure," she said to Mrs. Sweetbrier. "I'll drive and Lantana can see to you. The three of us will go that way, and we will see what we can salvage of your clothes and covers.

"Luce," she turned to me, "Maud has to go back tonight. There's not so many mules left that we can risk one. Are you and Lucas game to take the wagon back?"

The thought of the thick woods along the river was now filled with dread. I knew that for my own self-respect I must go back that way.

The car, a 1980 Plymouth, started on the second try and ran like a top. The gas gauge sat on a half tank, which would give us more mobility than we had had with only the pickup for transport. Once we were sure that the three women would get safely away, we went back to the dreaming Maud, waked her with a cluck, and turned back toward the forest.

It was already dusky beneath the trees. Owls were hooting already, and as we turned into the track, heading home, a bobcat squalled in a thicket, to be answered by another up ahead. Maud picked up her ears, realized that she was headed, at last, in the right direction, and all but broke into a trot. We jounced along in the wagon, teeth rattling, but we were, if truth be told, glad enough to be moving at such a good clip. Neither Lucas nor I had any desire to meet those who had attacked the Sweetbriers.

The wagon rattled and squeaked, the harness chinked softly, but I kept my ears cocked for any sound that seemed alien or threatening. I was listening so hard that I almost missed seeing what was before my eyes. Another pair of eyes was staring into mine from the covert of a
hucklebeny
thicket.

My hand came down on Lucas's shoulder in a thump, and he turned to look where I was staring. At that moment, three ragged figures rose from right, left, and ahead and Maud came to a halt.

They were women. Filthy, ragged, wild-haired, but definitely women. I kept my hands in my pockets as if I were cold, letting Lucas hail them.

"
Evenin
'." came his cool voice. "Might we help you ladies?"

The oldest, in the thicket at my right, stepped forward into the track, and I could see that she was wearing men's overalls, rubber boots, and a violently cerise sweater that emphasized her immense bosom. She was grinning, and I was not reassured by that awkwardly
lipsticked
grimace.

"Why likely you can, old man, she shrilled. "
Me'n
the girls just purely need a mule. Hadn't thought on it before, but
seein
' yours give us the notion, didn't it, girls?"

The other harridans, one very young, the other a well-used thirty, giggled but said nothing. Their pale gray eyes lent the only clean spots to their thoroughly begrimed faces, making a strangely sinister effect.

"Sorry," Lucas said. "We need the mule to help make our spring crop. We just came down to check on the Sweetbriers, make sure they were all right."

The three cackled, high and shrill. "And were they all right?" yelled the woman to my right.

The three moved toward us before Lucas could answer. The younger two carried heavy sticks–they looked like hoe handles. I remembered Jess, and I yelled at Lucas, "Go!"

The old woman's hand whipped out, holding a knife, reaching for the mule's throat. I shot her through my jacket pocket, and she fell sidewise into a clump of sumac.

As Maud bolted, I got off one shot at the one ahead, but she dived into the brush. Then all I could do was hold on, for Maud intended to arrive home ten minutes ago, and the wagon just had to trail along the best way that it could. I glanced back once, to see the two women bending over their fallen leader? Mother? Whatever.

I shook with regret. I hated to leave even one of them alive.

CHAPTER SIX

We had come at an easy pace. The washed-out sections of the track, the holes interrupted by knots of tree roots hadn't bothered us. Now they all but bounced us out of the wagon. And all that clatter and jounce was a drag on Maud, who soon slowed to a more reasonable gait.