by Ninie Hammon
“Showtime,” she whispered.
Howie Witherspoon would have lost his shirt at poker. His every emotion was stamped on his ugly face. But it wasn’t just his face that telegraphed everything going on inside him. His whole body was a quivering mass of messaging, his body language shouting his guilt to the rooftops, fear sweat wafting up off him like stink off pole cat roadkill.
Malachi watched the little man squirm, disgusted by his sniveling subservience. He was more than a little drunk. He had rushed up to Viola in that strange, hitching gait of his and Malachi could have sworn he almost fell to his knees in front of her. At the very least he wanted to reach out and kiss her ring.
Gratefully, he’d thought better of both those inappropriate responses and held fire just in time, merely began a whiney babble in a voice pitched too high for a man. Fear might have been squeezing his vocal cords, making it difficult to produce sound with them, but more likely the guy didn’t manufacture enough testosterone to produce a sufficiently masculine sound. Safe money was on Door Number Two — a man who’d beat his wife wasn’t really a man by anybody’s definition.
“I got here as fast as I could, Mrs. Tackett, jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could. You said to come right away. Well, your boy said you wanted to see me right away and I’d have gotten here sooner if—”
Viola’d finally had enough.
“Shut up, Howie,” she said.
Howie shut up.
A handful of people still milled around in the back of the courtroom and Viola directed Zach to shoo them out into the hallway, shut the door and not let anybody else inside, leaving only Malachi, Neb and Zach to watch the show.
Malachi leaned back against the railing that separated the room, crossed his arms over his chest and waited while his brother cleared the room. Then his mother turned and walked back up on the platform and sat down in the chair behind it. From this angle Malachi could see that the chair was rolled up to its highest position, leaving his mother’s feet to dangle a couple of inches off the floor when she sat down.
But the little-kid-in-a-grownup-chair image didn’t translate from in front of the platform, where she could be seen leaning over the judge’s “bench” and glaring at Howie Witherspoon, who’d been left standing alone before her.
The image put Malachi in mind of a frog in a cardboard box, looking up through the hole in the lid at the huge eye of a little kid. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Howie Witherspoon would wet his pants.
Viola’d just opened her mouth to speak when Obie peeked in the door through which the scraps of a crowd had just been moved out into the hallway.
“Whaddaya want us to do with him, Mama?” he asked.
Obie looked the most like their mother, though he was the most pleasant of the three, always had a smile on his face, in contrast to the scowl so deeply imprinted on Viola Tackett’s features Malachi was certain it would remain there when she died. Obie wasn’t smiling now, though. It was always hard for Malachi to watch his brothers struggle with the rudimentary mental tasks most people took for granted. Whenever any one of them was uncertain or confused, they turned to their mother for direction as unwaveringly as a four-year-old. And like small children, they were always uncertain the response they’d get for their intrusion into the affairs of grownups.
Obie’d been left to take down the body of Dylan Shaw, whose only crime was that he had stumbled into a useful position as a pawn in his mother’s chess game. She had hung him with no more compassion than she’d have shown to a roach she stepped on scurrying across the kitchen floor. Now the kid was nothing more than meat, a body to dispose of.
Malachi tried to think like a soldier. As a soldier, you had to be able to let things like that go. Fallen comrades couldn’t be mourned, not at the time anyway. Lose a step grieving over a friend and your buddies would be grieving over your body next. Every soldier mastered the mindset of setting aside emotion for another time and Malachi had been as good at that as most. But he couldn’t summon that way of thinking now. Dylan Shaw wasn’t a soldier who’d fallen in battle. He was a kid Malachi’s mother had murdered, a young man whose dead body was now her only concern.
“Figure it out your own self,” Viola snapped at Obie, knowing full well he was incapable, but knowing also that he’d find somebody standing around who’d help him come up with something. Folks would be very willing indeed now, to help out the Tacketts, to provide for them any service they needed.
“Yes ma’am,” Obie said and closed the door.
Viola turned her attention to the smarmy little man standing below her. Which had been calculated, of course. She’d climbed back up there in the judge’s seat for the express purpose of using her position there for intimidation. Malachi couldn’t figure out why, though. She already intimidated the man, and this time when she handed down a guilty verdict, she would at least be serving justice.
“Now you, Howie. You gonna tell me what you done with your dead wife’s body or are you gonna make me drag it out of you?”
Howie Witherspoon wet his pants.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
That judge lady had told Toby to stay in the room where the man put him, but she didn’t say nothing about where in the room he was supposed to stay. So Toby crossed to the door leading back into the courtroom as soon as the man left, opened the door a crack, and tried to see and hear what was going on in the courtroom. He could hear fairly well. The judge woman was talking to a man who called her Mama. They were having an argument. It wasn’t like Toby Witherspoon had never before heard grownups argue. He’d spent his life listening to it, except he didn’t. When his parents started going at it, Toby did his dead level best not to hear it. Would get in his bed sometimes and put the pillow over his head. But even with the pillow over his head he could hear his mother screaming when his daddy hit her.
He tried to pay attention to this argument, but he didn’t understand what it was about and it was always easy to figure out what his parents were fighting about.
His father had come home late. His father had been drinking too much. His father was out “catting around,” but Toby didn’t know what that meant.
Or his mother had not ironed his father’s shirt to suit him. Or she had let his dinner get cold when he came home late to eat it. Or she spent too much money or too much time on the telephone or was too fat or too loud or too …
These people weren’t fighting about anything like that so Toby tuned them out. He wanted to sit down on the floor, was more tired than could be explained by riding his bike the four or five miles from his house into town. He was tired somewhere that wasn’t about his arms and legs. Tired somewhere deep inside that was about who he was, worn out there from being afraid all the time. And missing his mother. She wasn’t coming home; even if the Jabberwock lifted, she wasn’t ever coming back. And thinking about that made him tired in the deep place where he wanted to go to sleep and not ever wake up.
Then he heard his father’s voice and pulled the door open wider to listen and saw his father come running into the room. His father was hot and sweaty, like he was the one that’d ridden a bicycle into town instead of driving in an air-conditioned car. He looked worse than he’d looked last night. All the bruising was worse, the black eyes darker, the nose more swollen, the lip all puffed out. He had wrapped a huge bandage around his hand.
His father started talking, too fast, sounded like Toby’d sounded when he told the judge lady his story. He’d known he was talking too fast, needed to slow down so she could catch everything he was saying, but he hadn’t been able to slow down and he figured his father wasn’t able to slow down now. Then the judge lady told his father to shut up and he did.
Toby waited.
Then he heard the judge lady ask his father, flat out what he had done with his wife’s body. Just flat out asked. She had believed Toby. She had. She didn’t even need to go out to his house and dig up …
What happened after that was confusing. Toby
thought he knew what was going on, but then it didn’t make any sense. The judge lady made his father admit what he’d done. It didn’t take her long, and his father had cried when he talked about it, was trying to make the judge lady feel sorry for him, like what he’d done was an accident, that he hadn’t meant to kill her. Surely the judge lady was too smart to fall for that excuse.
And she didn’t seem to. She spoke to his father real mean, told him she’d ought to string him up from the pole out in front of the building like she’d just done that kid. The one Toby’d seen who’d wet his pants before he died.
The part Toby didn’t understand came next. She talked about how she was in charge and everybody had to do things her way. About loyalty, not double crossing your partners. She talked about needing people she could count on, about how he’d owe her his life, about how she would draw and quarter him, use tractors instead of horses, whatever that meant, if he wasn’t faithful and loyal.
None of that had anything to do with his father killing his mother. Then she’d told that man to “go get the boy,” and he had time to close the door and go stand against the far wall before the man came in so he didn’t know Toby’d been listening.
When Toby came out into the courtroom, he knew something really, really bad had happened. His father looked happy. The man who’d been arguing with the judge lady looked like he was so mad he was likely to explode. And the judge lady looked at Toby like he wasn’t even there. The man led him out into the room and made him stand right beside his father. Toby smelled something, sniffed, then looked. He couldn’t believe it, but the proof was right there, the dark stain. His father had wet his pants.
“You, son, I want you to listen up,” the judge lady told him. “You ain’t gonna go around spreading stories about your father no more, you hear me?”
Toby said nothing, didn’t know he was supposed to answer until she said all mean-like, “I asked you a question, boy.”
“I … yes, I hear you. But … what are you going to do about my daddy killing—” That’s as far as he got before his father slapped him, knocked him off his feet so hard he hit the marble floor and slid across it.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” the judge lady said. “Them lies about your daddy killing your mother. You ain’t gonna tell them lies no more, you hear me?”
Toby’s cheek was on fire and his nose was bleeding. He could feel the trickle of blood beneath it. He felt the trickle run down his lip when he sat up and looked at the lady.
“Yes ma’am, I hear you.” He wasn’t afraid and he should have been. He should have been scared to death because it was plain that what’d happened was the judge lady had sided with his father and not with Toby. But Toby wasn’t scared. He just felt tired. That tired from way down in the bottom of himself, the tired that made him just want to sleep.
“‘Cause if you do open up your trap again,” his father said, “you gonna wish you hadn’t.”
Toby looked up at his father. He’d seen that look in his father’s eye before, right before he started beating on Toby’s mother with his belt.
The judge lady gestured to the garbage bag on the floor that Toby’d used to carry his mother’s purse on his bicycle. The purse was lying on the floor beside it.
“You ought to have burned it,” she told his father and threw something at him which he tried to catch and missed. It tumbled to the floor. It was his mother’s wallet.
Then she told his father to “take your snot-nosed brat and get out of here.”
That’s when the man who’d been leaning against the railing kind of exploded. He’d just been watching, looking mad, but he suddenly started shouting at the judge lady, telling her she couldn’t be serious, that she wasn’t really going to send a little boy home with his murderous father, that she couldn’t—
And then she yelled back. Except she didn’t yell. She just spoke in a normal voice but it was so mean-sounding it was like she was yelling. She told him that this wasn’t none of his concern, and if he tried to make it his concern, “… your little friend Charlie’s gonna get a visit from me.”
The man shut up. It was like she’d slapped him the way Toby’s father had slapped Toby.
Toby’s father reached for the garbage bag and wallet on the floor, but the woman barked, “Leave it.” So he grabbed Toby by the arm and glared at him. There was murder in his eyes.
That’s what it was, a rage cranked up higher than any he’d displayed toward Toby’s mother. It was probably the look he had in his eye, the last look she ever saw there. And then Toby was afraid. Not tired anymore, terrified. So scared he would have wet his own pants if he had needed to go.
His father yanked on his arm, and Toby looked at the man who had argued with his mother. Their eyes met and locked for a heartbeat, then his father yanked again and dragged Toby away.
Chapter Thirty
Malachi Tackett would have bet everything he owned, which, granted, wasn’t a whole lot, that he was incapable of being surprised by anything his mother did.
He was dead wrong. As soon as he realized where his mother was going in her conversation with Howie Witherspoon, he was so shocked he really couldn’t think of much at all.
She was going to let the slime bag go. She was willing to hang an innocent kid for something he didn’t do, but unwilling to punish a murderer.
Blackmail, pure and simple. Oh, Viola Tackett didn’t need anything to hold over a person’s head to induce them to do her bidding and to convince them she would make them pay if they didn’t. She would drop anybody at a whim and the whole county knew it. But for some reason, she’d decided to make this beat-up monster a slave on some higher order of magnitude. A slave squared. She’d made it clear to him that she wouldn’t just kill him if he ever dared to let her down, she would draw and quarter him. Right there in the street in front of the courthouse. She’d tie his arms and legs to tractors and literally rip him apart.
Why?
Why did she …?
And then Malachi let it go. There might not even be a reason why she’d done it, and if there was it was so sick and twisted Malachi would never be able to figure it out.
Even so, even after all that, Malachi didn’t grasp that she meant to give the man back his kid until she did it. He assumed Viola would find somewhere to stick the boy, find some relative or neighbor. Make the boy shut up about his father, sure, scare him into keeping silence, but find him somewhere to go that was safe. Nope. She tossed the boy right back into the jaws of the lion that had eaten his mother.
Malachi went postal.
He stormed across the room toward his mother, shouting. He should have held onto his temper better than that, but as soon as he realized that she was actually going to … he lost it.
“Mama you can’t do that!”
“There ain’t nothing I can’t do.”
“You can’t send that kid back home with the—”
“I can send that kid to the moon on a Frisbee if I want to.”
“Don’t you realize—?”
“Don’t you realize this ain’t none of your concern?”
“How can you possibly—?”
“I can because I can, and you need to back off and go mind your own business.”
Before he could say another word, she spoke softly. “Or your little friend Charlie’s gonna get a visit from me.”
Malachi was shocked into silence. Found that not only could he not speak, he couldn’t even breathe. His mother tossed the evidence of the man’s crime back at him, told him to burn it, then told the guy to take his kid and get out.
The man grabbed the boy by the arm with his unbandaged hand and when he did the boy’s terrified eyes found Malachi’s. The terror in him was too great to be contained in the eyes of a little boy not yet tall enough to ride the rollercoaster at the fair.
The fear leapt across the room like a lightning bolt and slammed into Malachi’s chest. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen a look of fear like that on a little
boy’s face.
The murdering Hutus stand aside, bloody instruments of death in their hands, wild-eyed, crazed by drugs and blood lust, waiting for the Americans to leave before they fall on the hut full of Tutsi villagers and massacre them all.
Then a woman bursts out the door of the house and runs toward the American soldiers, she carries a baby and is dragging a boy of about eight by the arm.
“Take my children,” she cries at the soldiers. “Save them.”
The Hutu with a scar on his face takes two great strides and slashes into her back with a machete and she drops the baby. Another one with a sharpened stick impales the infant with it. But the little boy makes it to the soldiers, to Malachi, grabs hold of him in a death grip and tries to hide behind him.
Malachi glances down into the boy’s face. The terror in his eyes bores all the way through layers of military training and professional detachment into the core of the human being who is Malachi Tackett.
Malachi had shot the Hutu with a machete advancing on the boy. Had swung his rifle around ready to mow down every one of the other monsters. But his best friend had knocked him unconscious, saved him from the consequences of an act that would likely have set off an international incident.
When Malachi’d come to and asked about the boy, his friend had told him the murdering Hutus had cut off his head, gave it to Malachi’s sergeant as a present for Malachi.
Malachi stepped obediently back to the railing and watched the father drag his son out of the courtroom. Waited for his mother to finish giving directions to his brothers.
“You ain’t got no truck. How’d you get here?” his mother asked him, then answered her own question before he had a chance. “Rode with that McClintock woman, did you?” She smiled. “I seen she had the good judgment to make herself scarce. You can ride with me, but we ain’t going out Gizzard Ridge. I got new digs.”
