Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

  “What happens to the wife?” Sam asked, his posture unsticking as he listened.

  “Good question,” Mrs. McCormick said. “She was delicate, like I said, and she got sick from the trip. And they’re only your age, might as well be babies. The second son puts her up in that big plantation and gets her all the best care money can buy, but she doesn’t get better. She catches fevers and won’t eat, and she wastes down to skin and bones.”

  “The Fultons had a plantation?” Andrew cut in.

  “Of course! I bet the old house is still standing out there, but you wouldn’t know it. The ones that came back after the war moved to the opposite end of their land and built fresh,” she said.

  On some level Andrew had forgotten, spending his years as a teen and then a young man in northern Ohio, that histories had a longer and uglier reach where he was from. His mind turned straight to the fat zeroes in his accounts, the estate he’d inherited and the implications of where it came from, with a creeping dread. Of course the Fultons had owned a fucking plantation—how else had he imagined them getting rich?

  “Sounds like something out of a book already,” Sam said, oblivious to his ongoing internal reckoning.

  Mrs. McCormick laughed, a brief pealing sound. Her husband chuckled as well. His fond approval radiated from the attention he paid her as she spoke. Andrew noted their openness, then asked, troubled, “What happened next? After she got sick?”

  “This is where it gets interesting. The second son loves this girl so much he decides to step onto an unholy path. Now the story varies, but in the one my mama told me, he makes a deal. He takes his youngest sister, goes out to a crossroad on the property past the witching hour, and he waits until some evil comes to him. He looks that evil square in the face and offers it his sister in return for his wife.”

  Despite her warning of grimness, her face was alight with the pleasure of spinning out the tale, leading them from one beat to the next. He supposed she hadn’t had much occasion to tell it. He hadn’t noticed pictures on the mantles or the walls, not of children or grandchildren.

  “He kills his sister,” Sam guessed.

  “Of course he does,” Mr. McCormick said.

  “Naturally,” his wife confirmed. “He slashes her throat and she bleeds out onto the crossroads. Right where they put the marker of the estate, if you’re feeling symbolic. It’s old land anyway, land that’s had people doing their deeds on it for a long time before the Fultons decided to own it. So he sheds her blood, then he opens his wrist and gives it some of his, and he makes a deal that if he can have power over his wife’s death, he’ll keep giving the land more.”

  Andrew stopped breathing, hands gone tense around his arms. Blood for blood, offered to the earth—wasn’t that a familiar story, one that lived curled up at the core of him.

  “The wife lives,” Mr. McCormick said, glancing between Andrew and Sam. “He blames the sister’s murder on another man. But the land’s alive, after that, because his sacrifice woke up whatever thing had been sleeping there.”

  “And deals with the devil aren’t ever equal, which is where the curse comes in,” his wife continued, trading the telling to and fro between them.

  Sam’s boot heel ground into his toes so hard Andrew jerked. Mrs. McCormick gave him a curious look and said, “Oh, are you all right?”

  He said, “Sorry, cold chill.”

  He forced himself to take a breath, then another, and another. His heart pounded fit to burst through his ribs. Eddie’s notebooks had been full of references to families and land and sacrifice. And the things that had happened in the cavern—

  “The important part is that the deal doesn’t miracle-cure his wife. Instead, he gets some sort of terrible gift to manipulate death itself, and it drives him mad. His brothers end up locking him up in the big house along with his wife, who ain’t right either. They grow and die together. The brothers raise their children as their own. It was a scandal and a shame to the whole bunch of them,” the old woman wrapped up with panache, crossing her arms over her pink-flamingoed bosom in pride.

  “Damn, that’s wild,” Sam said. He slathered his vowels out like welcoming honey, boot grinding constant and careful onto the top of Andrew’s foot. The minor, grounding pain sparking on those fine bones kept Andrew from rocketing out of the trailer in a blind panic. “That story hit all the notes I’d want and then some.”

  “Thanks hon. Lot of Fultons follow after that, but—” Mrs. McCormick glanced at Andrew once in sympathy before continuing at a more sedate volume, “Their line’s cursed with death. Almost all of ’em died in the Civil War, and the handful that built the estate up after, kept it going, they had the worst luck. The story has it that even those who don’t try to wrangle the curse, like the second son who brought it on them, it wrangles them in the end regardless. The land’s hungry, and it gets its due, one way or another.”

  “Thank you. He’s right, that’s a hell of a story.” Andrew fumbled for his phone under the pretense of checking the time. “Hey, don’t you have to get to work?”

  “Yeah, probably got to get going,” Sam said as he pushed his chair out.

  “Was that useful?” Mrs. McCormick said. She gathered up the glasses to bustle them over to the sink. Mr. McCormick stayed seated. “I hope it wasn’t too upsetting.”

  “No, no, it’s real interesting,” Andrew said.

  “I’m from around here, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard it before,” Sam added.

  “I might reach out again,” Andrew said.

  “Of course, please do,” she replied.

  He blanked out for the walk to the car. He found himself struggling with the seat belt; lining up the buckle with the receiver might as well have been brain surgery. His mouth was full of spit, nostrils flaring with each taut, panicked breath. Sam smacked his knuckles, latched the buckle for him, then grabbed the base of his skull for a squeeze.

  “Hush, dude, you’re good. It’s done,” he said. His palm and fingers were broad, thumb pressed under one ear and nails scratching near the crown of Andrew’s scalp.

  “What the fuck,” he whispered.

  “Why are you so freaked?”

  “Get me out of here.”

  The loss of the grounding pressure on his scalp when Sam switched his hand to the gearshift almost spun him off the face of the earth. He dug the heels of his hands into his eye sockets while the car purred around him. The grand staircase flashed in his mind, unfamiliar but familiar. He remembered the gaping cave of the drawing room and the forbidding, locked door that stood between him and the dark inheritance his revenant so wished for him to embrace.

  “His parents died in a wreck, you know that? Slid right off the road head-on into a tree. Happened on the property,” Andrew said into the silence.

  “It’s just another story, Andrew,” Sam said.

  In lieu of a response, he opened his phone’s notes app to painstakingly type the McCormicks’ version of the Fulton curse with his thumbs. The tale had all the hallmarks of Eddie’s favorite Southern gothics: a devil’s bargain, a damned lineage, an eldritch power resurrected. Except the tale belonged to him, the scion of a cursed house moldering in the woods, answering a question he’d been asking for almost a decade—the one Andrew had strenuously avoided for just as long.

  But Eddie had never made it out to interview the McCormicks. He’d found some other record of the curse to hunt down in his final days. Troth said he’d mentioned some breakthrough at her dinner party, the last outing he’d attended. Without his notes, Andrew had no idea what he’d discovered or where, only that between his lucky find and the interview he’d intended to do with the McCormicks, trouble had found him and the land had taken its due.

  As Andrew’s thumb hovered over the keyboard, partway through a sentence about the hubris of the second Fulton son, an incoming call took over the screen, phone vibrating angrily in his hand. He fumbled to answer with a brief, “Hey.”

  “Found something kind of weird. Whe
re you at?” Riley asked.

  “With your cousin, running down an interview from that list of names.” Sam shot him a look, curious. He switched the phone to his left hand, angling his torso toward the window to escape observation in the close space. “What is it?”

  “Okay so, near the last pages of the journal he writes about finding a mention of the Fultons in a genealogical history—and that mention referenced another book, get this, a monograph from the late forties about supernatural lore and folk magic in rural Tennessee,” he said in a rush.

  “Maybe that’s the breakthrough he told people about. Did he find the monograph?”

  “Here’s where that gets a little weird. I went looking for the monograph, because it’s obvious he found it given the timeline of his notes, but the damn thing has disappeared into thin air. It’s not with his materials or in the carrel, and the library system says it’s checked out. I’ve spent the whole fucking afternoon combing shelves to see if it got misplaced or something, but nada. I know it’s minor, but given everything else, it strikes me as off.”

  “Yeah, more of his shit going missing fits in with the rest.” Andrew struggled to connect the dots as his thoughts chased themselves in circles. The McCormicks’ tale was trope-filled and appropriately spooky, but didn’t seem too special on the outside—unless someone knew, like Eddie did, that it held a kernel more truth than most.

  “It’s either correlated with the phone and the notes or the worst coincidence in hell. The question I’ve got now is: was it the research someone got after, or something he found in the research?”

  Andrew grunted his neutral agreement with Riley’s train of thought. “See if you can find another copy of that monograph, and I guess we’ll find out.”

  “On it, boss man,” he said with a tinge of snark and hung up.

  Window glass propped up his forehead, cool and soothing. After the initial burst of adrenaline faded, he felt emptied out. The sedation of rhythmic movement and enclosed silence dragged Andrew’s eyelids down in swooping blinks as he drifted between sleep and consciousness. Sam turned on his stereo system and spun the volume knob to a faint murmur.

  The ratchet of the parking brake startled Andrew alert. He straightened out his kinked back, disoriented and cotton-mouthed, fighting to process the sight of a garage wall plastered with band posters. He croaked, “Your place?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Leave Riley out of this, going forward. He doesn’t need to be fucking with it.”

  Addled from his impromptu nap, he said, “What?”

  “I don’t see this curse business turning up rainbows, Andrew, so leave him out of it,” he repeated. “Find that shit yourself, don’t send him looking for it. I don’t want him involved any further.”

  “He’s a grown man,” Andrew said.

  A muscle in Sam’s jaw twitched. He let a breath out through his nose and opened his car door, stuck one leg out, then said, “I’m not asking your opinion.”

  “What is your problem—” he started.

  Sam slammed his door midsentence. Andrew sat in the car as Sam mounted the steps into the house, leaving the interior door hanging open behind him as an obvious demand. Andrew swallowed his pride and got out to follow. At the kitchen table he took the unoccupied seat in front of a neat glass of bourbon and faced Sam, already sprawled in his chair, indolent, radiating displeasure. His glass dangled from his fingers. Andrew sipped while looking right at him, waiting as the silence stretched.

  “Why can’t you be the one to tell him?” Andrew asked when it became clear Sam wasn’t going to start the fight. “You have the problem, so you can tell him to back off.”

  “The last thing he’s interested in is me parenting him,” Sam said.

  “Then don’t parent him,” Andrew replied, unprepared for how adult he felt.

  “He still needs it, and he deserves to make something of himself without getting pulled into this wreck of a situation,” Sam said with a broad gesture in his general direction. “In case you missed it, the last person doing the research you just asked him to do is dead. Have you thought enough about that?”

  “Riley was Eddie’s friend,” he said.

  “Yeah, and so was I. Look where that got us. This is our problem to solve, you and me. I’m not going to ask you again,” he said.

  The weight of the preceding weeks crashed onto Andrew in a tumult, filling him up to bursting and straining all his existing fissures. Andrew leaned forward with both elbows braced on the table to snap, “I’m not your bitch, so tell him yourself.”

  Violence crackled between them despite the calmness of the kitchen, the shared drink, the loose posture. Riley’s involvement was tangential to Andrew’s anger; he wasn’t sure what about the situation made him so fucking furious, but his temper was not about to slow down. The last time a man had the gall to tell him I’m not going to ask you again, it had been Eddie. He’d been telling Andrew to shut up about coming to Nashville in the spring, earlier than planned. Andrew didn’t take those kinds of orders from Sam.

  Sam got up and rounded the table, saying, “I know your spoiled ass doesn’t understand what it’s like to claw your way out of awful shit, and neither did Ed. So I’m going to tell you this once”—mid-sentence, he shoved Andrew’s chair out cockeyed with a foot on one wooden leg; Andrew caught himself with a heel on the ground before he tipped over—“and you’re damn well going to listen. That kid has had it hard enough already, and I will not fucking tolerate any threat to him or his success. Not from you, not from Ed, not from myself. You got me?”

  “You think I don’t know what that’s like, huh,” Andrew said.

  Sam’s shinbone ground against his calf, boot still planted on his chair leg. Andrew grasped the table and leveraged himself to standing, nose to nose with Sam, invading his space in turn. From other nights, fire nights, he knew the taste of the fight about to unfurl between them. Swift and brutal, to assume the least.

  “Yeah, I do. Everything’s been handed to you. You live in your own fucking world, and all you see is you and him,” Sam accused, breath reeking of liquor, his glare just as scouring.

  Andrew said, “I see you, Sam. You don’t see me, though, if you think that’s true.”

  “Ain’t it? Prove me wrong,” Sam demanded.

  He splayed his hand on Andrew’s sternum. Andrew grabbed his wrist to pin him still, the fingertips digging into his pectoral muscle as if Sam could scoop out his beating heart. He squeezed the thick wrist in his grip until his healing forearm hurt from the strain. Sam took it, unimpressed, forcing him a step backward until the edge of the chair bumped the backs of his knees. Seconds dragged out as the room fell silent, each watching the other, skin to skin.

  Andrew spilled over first: “When we were kids, I followed Ed into the woods. He was feeling something weird. He had to figure out what it was. When it started getting dark, I asked him to go back. He said no. We got a minute or two farther in and fell down a fucking sinkhole.” The confession scalded him from the inside out. “I broke my ankle, he concussed himself. We couldn’t climb out. I broke all my fingernails trying to get up the dirt. The sun went down. He was delirious, bleeding goddamn everywhere. I’d cut myself from ass to shoulder on a root. You want me to keep going?”

  “You’re not dead,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, fucking fancy that.”

  Sam broke Andrew’s grip with a simple twist of his wrist, as if he’d only been waiting for the right moment. In the process he caught the start of the raw brown-red scab Andrew’s sleeve failed to cover. One additional step to the side broke their clinch. Sam gestured to his arm and Andrew realized his cover was blown.

  “What’d you do?” Sam asked.

  “I thought you didn’t want to get involved with my weird shit,” he said.

  “I really don’t,” he said, “but you’re going to tell me anyway.”

  One thing at a time, Andrew thought, rancor simmering at Sam for thi
nking he was soft and spoiled. “You want me to finish the other story first or not?”

  Sam gulped the last of his bourbon in two huge swallows and bared his teeth in a sinus-clearing gasp of relief. Trees loomed outside the kitchen windows in the settling night. Andrew felt a desperate call to speak, maddened by the unstoppable fractures spreading from his past to his present; he was the sole living person who knew the tale he was about to tell from front to finish. After he told it, he wouldn’t be alone.

  “Fine,” Sam said. “Porch. Let’s go.”

  23

  Andrew sat on the edge of the porch with his legs dangling behind the bushes and Sam settled down next to him, one big hand planted on the concrete between his spread thighs. The minutely grating seam of the concrete sank into Andrew’s hamstrings, a distracting line of pressure. Fireflies blinked through the gloom of later evening, brief lights there and gone. Starting again after the fight had stalled out felt wrong, so Andrew offered, “You want to see the scar?”

  “Guess it’s fair, I know you saw mine,” Sam said.

  Andrew skinned his shirt over his head, the mop of his hair collapsing around his face in disarray as the collar pulled it. Sam leaned back on his hands to have a long look and whistled through his teeth, then said, “Got you deep, huh?”

  Andrew often forgot about the long weal of white, puckered skin that ran up the left-middle of his back, until he caught sight of it in an angled mirror; at a glance, it looked like someone had tried to pull his spine through his skin crooked.

  “The paramedics were surprised I hadn’t bled out,” he said.

  “Mine are shallow, but there’s more of ’em,” Sam said. “If we’re trading here.”

  Andrew balled the shirt up in his fist and turned his arms to hide the scabs, his belly plumping to little rolls as he bent forward over his thighs. Sam stayed reclined, giving him the illusion of privacy as he began to speak.