by Billy Coffey
But I do not scream because I know no help will come. And I do not run because this is hell and sin is a circle, and the faster you run away, the sooner you return to it again.
Phillip squeezes my hand. I’d free you, Jake. He’s come and so have I, and you are a dead man just as Kate is a dead woman.
“No,” I beg. “Leave Kate alone. We were just kids—”
So was I. Do you remember, Jake. Do you remember true?
Before I can answer, the Hollow’s dead calm is torn by a deep thrum that shakes the trees. The river churns below us. The earth shudders and gives way. I’m thrown forward as the scream I’ve held tight is loosed. Phillip grips my hand and pulls me back.
Time to go, Jake. He’s coming. The only way out is through, but there’s power in believing. Do you hear me? There is power in believing.
The sun grows dim above us—orange to brown to blackish-gray, like an open sore staining the clouds. The thrum pulses in my ears. I feel it in my teeth. Trees uproot and fly skyward. Phillip releases me and I am sucked up. I reach for him, frantic, but Phillip steps back and lifts his fist to me. He says he’ll see me soon, because I’m a dead man and Kate is dead too, and I will remember. We all will remember. I hurtle toward the hole in the world and close my eyes opened to the dark. My hand stretched up toward the ceiling, still reaching for Phillip. I lowered it to wake Kate and stopped when I heard that thrumming sound again. It was my cell phone vibrating. The word Private glowed on the screen.
I pushed the covers back—still not sure if I was asleep or not—and carried the phone down the hallway. Dreaming. I’m dreaming, I thought, because I couldn’t feel myself moving at all. I floated instead. Or was being pulled. Yes, now that I think about it, that’s what I felt. I was being pulled, and Phillip was doing the pulling. Right through the screen door and onto the porch.
I opened the phone and said, “This is Jake.”
“’Lo, Jake.”
The voice was gravelly and deep and wholly unfamiliar. I looked at the screen again. PRIVATE still shone.
“Who I got here?” I asked.
There came a sigh and, “Guess remembering was asking too much, Jake. Didn’t think you’d be one to forget so easy.”
The cool breeze against my skin helped wake me. I rubbed my eyes and gripped the wooden bannister on the porch, telling myself this was real, I was real.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m still half asleep. Tell me who this is?”
“I’m the man what’s waking your town, Jake.”
A thought forced its way through my tangled mind. My voice trembled when it spoke. No amount of bravery could keep it from doing so. “Taylor?”
“Winner winner chicken dinner,” came the reply. “Give that man a prize.”
“Where are you?”
“Now, Jake, you think I’m dense? No. An’ don’t bother trying to find me over this fancy deviltry I’m talking into, because that’s been fixed. I hear all it takes is touching a few buttons and you’re called Private. That means you cain’t trace me and we can talk proper. We got a lot to ruminate on, Jake. Our time’s come. Do you understand?”
“No,” I said. My voice was little more than a series of rattles in my throat. I took a deep breath to calm it. It didn’t work. “Tell me where you are, Taylor. I’ll send some boys to bring you down to the sheriff’s office. We can talk there.”
“Apologies, but no. I’m without Charlie now. You squirreled him away, that it? To befuddle me? That trick almost worked, Jake. As sure as the day, it almost did. But I got tricks too. Charlie weren’t the only one helping me. Got me a smart one.”
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. Hearing Taylor’s voice was bad enough. Knowing he was still free and had another accomplice was worse.
“Charlie’s dead, Taylor, and I put his dying square on you. Eric Thayer’s too, plus the two men you hurt. You’ll ride the lightning straight to hell if this is your course. Your only chance at living’s to surrender and plead mercy.”
Taylor laughed. It was a shrill sound, like a crow cawing. “Living? I’m the only one living, Jake. Not like you. But I know that pain. I remember it well. We’ve had our troubles. I ain’t forgotten that even if you did. You saved me, Jake, so I’ll only warn. Just this once, mind you. Call off those county men. You do that tomorrow first thing, or your sins will find you out.”
“What sins?” I asked.
Silence. I had no idea what Taylor would say, but to me that pause was something intentional, like he was savoring the telling the way you savor a bite of food and roll it around in your mouth before you bite down.
“I know what you did that day in the Holler, Jake. To that boy.”
Waves of heat and tightness spread across my chest. The world folded over and engulfed me. There in the quiet darkness of my front porch, I dropped to my haunches.
“Now don’t get all worked up, Jake,” Taylor said. “It’s okay. I know it must pain. But I fancy the pain of ever’body in that town knowing what you did’d be worse. That right? You ain’t told your own boy, have you? You tell him what you did, Jake? You tell Kate?”
“How do you know of my family?” I asked. My grip on the phone was tight, my voice still shaking, but now it was anger rather than fear that colored my words.
“I see far, Jake. You call them mounties off. You do that, I’ll hold my tongue. I’ll let your secrets be your own. They’ll fester on your insides, but you’ll live on the outside. Ain’t that what matters to you in the end?”
I said nothing at first. My mind was too busy, my thoughts buzzing like a swarm of flies over something rotten. Because Taylor was right. God help me, he was.
“Where are you, Taylor?”
“Close, Jake. I always been close.”
I heard a click as the line went dead. I closed the phone and looked out over the blank night. The stars were out, tiny pricks of faraway white that shone over the mountains. I followed the bends and dips of the Blue Ridge until my eyes rested where Happy Hollow lay. Far away, the clock tower tolled.
I opened the phone. My trembling hands betrayed me twice, but I managed to punch in *69 on the third try. There was no number for me to dial. Just a few buttons, he’d said. That’s all it took to tame the deviltry. Because Taylor knew tricks too and he had a smart one to help him now.
I wanted to pray then. I wanted to beg for help and rescue. But I knew buried in that petition would be a subtle request to roll that snowball of lies a little farther down the steep hill my life had become, even if it would someday grow so big it destroyed everything.
I walked inside and eased the screen door closed, stared at all those fragile holes in the mesh, then closed the front door as well. My fingers touched the small switch on the knob. I clicked it, then fingered it again to make sure it’d been fully turned. I had never once locked that door. Not before bed, not leaving for work. There had been no need for such a thing. This was Mattingly, after all.
That night Zach tossed and turned and kept his cap gun close. I did the same with Bessie. Sleep didn’t come, but I doubted Phillip would have visited me again anyway. I figured he’d already said his piece.
10
It was not the buzz of an alarm or thundering music from the radio that woke Lucy the next morning, but a sharp perfume that licked at her nose and flooded her mouth with saliva. She kept her eyes closed and rolled her head, content to smell rather than see. There was breakfast—she smelled meat and something that could be potatoes—along with the faint sweetness of burning wood and the soft sulfur of smoke. Above it all was Taylor’s musky scent. She turned her nose into the soft bed of pine boughs beneath her one last time, breathing in earth and sky.
She opened her eyes and saw Taylor watching her from his place at the table. Lucy quickly lowered her gaze to the faded plastic bowl in front of him. Steam rose from its contents in tendrils that curled and disappeared. A metal cup sat beside the bowl. Another bowl and cup, these larger and more full, waited at the emp
ty place across from him.
“I gathered breakfast,” he said. “Figured you’d be peckish.”
Lucy rose and crossed the room in four small steps. She plucked three pine needles that had stuck to her chin and shook her hair out as she sat. The bowl in front of her held some sort of stew, the broth thick and near the brim. Taylor spooned a hunk of meat into his mouth. He smiled as he chewed. Lucy picked up the tarnished spoon beside her and stirred the bowl. Clumps of meat rose to the surface, surrounded by white masses she took as some sort of vegetable.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Rabbit and cattail shoots.”
Lucy winced and sat the spoon down.
“Case you forgot,” Taylor said, “this here’s no downtown. This is free land, lady, and living such means providing for your own needs. Now go on. It smells good. If it smells good, it’ll eat good.”
It did smell good. Lucy inhaled and the scent traveled well south of her nose and settled into the roomy part of her stomach, where it came to life in a series of hungry rumbles. She eased the spoon into the bowl and fished out a small bit of meat and shoots. Taylor watched as she raised the bite to her mouth.
Flavor exploded over Lucy’s tongue. The meat was lean and juicy, with just a hint of wildness that balanced the salty, cucumber-like taste of the cattail. She swallowed and plunged her spoon in for more, taking two bites and then three before swallowing again, feeling Taylor’s smile but not seeing it. Though she had tried once that morning and twice the night before, she could not look at him. She had not known Eric Thayer and had never seen his likeness, but still it was a dead boy’s face she saw where Taylor’s should have been.
“Got some pine needle tea there in your cup,” he said. “Good for your insides. But take care not to drink it if you’re in the family way. It’ll slay your darling inside.”
Lucy thought of Johnny and what still lay on the living room carpet in the place she once called home. She said, “I’m not pregnant,” and drained the cup in one gulp. It was not as good as the food but pleasant enough. Her torpor sloughed off like an old skin.
“You’ll be late for your studies,” Taylor said. His tone was a cautious probing, if not dispassionate. “Reckon your ma and da will be missing you too.”
“I don’t care to see anyone at school right now.” Lucy pointed to her head without looking up, without looking at him. “I’d rather not play twenty questions with this. And I’d rather not talk about my parents.”
Taylor seemed as though he understood that sentiment well enough. “That what got you acting so standoffish this morning?”
Lucy took another bite and asked, “Why am I hungry if I’m only dreaming? And why am I getting full if what I’m eating isn’t real?”
“Because you’re not really hungry, and you’re not really eating.”
“But I am.”
“Are you certain?” Taylor asked. “Truly so?”
“As sure as the world is round,” Lucy said.
Taylor smiled and raised a finger skyward. Lucy had a strange feeling she’d hit upon the very point he wanted her to. He said, “Well now, folk once said the world’s flat, did they not? Now they say it’s round. And they were firm that the stars drifted around us too, but now they say we go round the stars. They know so much, but they always change their mind of what they’re sure of. How much of what they know is so and how much is what they only wish is so?” Taylor put his spoon down. “Let me inquire of this, Lucy Seekins—we found this world’s plump, not fat, and winged, not still. You ever wonder what folk know of today that’ll be torn asunder tomorrow?”
Lucy fell quiet. There had been just enough fact mixed in with what he’d said to silence her. To make her listen.
“But that ain’t what’s got you riled, is it?” Taylor asked. “I sent you from this Holler a friend, but you came back a stranger. Why’s that, lady? And no secrets. This’s a place of truth, and I’d have you speak as such.”
Secrets, yes. Lucy did have secrets now, and that muddied what truth there was to be found. Taylor had asked her if she’d found Kate in town, and Lucy had said no. Why had she said no?
She thought of all Taylor had said of Kate and all Kate had said of the boy. Eric had been his name. Eric Thayer. And though Lucy had hoped (as if the heart could hope such a thing) it had been Charlie who’d killed that poor boy, a part of her had known even while Kate spoke that it had instead been the man at whose table she sat and whose food she ate.
And what did that mean? Who could Lucy trust?
Kate Barnett certainly acted like no killer. Taylor Hathcock certainly did. But there was something other to him, a woundedness that in some ways made Lucy forgive him for the sins he’d confessed. She thought of the way she’d faced Kate the day before on the sidewalk in front of the sheriff’s office—legs pointed one way, feet the other. It was the same way she’d faced Taylor at the gate later that night. It seemed to Lucy at that moment an outward expression of her inward condition. When it came right down to it, Lucy Seekins simply didn’t know where to go. She never had.
“The boy you . . . woke,” Lucy said. “I can’t look at you without seeing him. I wonder what kind of man could do that to someone else, and I wonder if that’s the kind of man whose floor I want to sleep on and whose food I want to eat. I heard you talking to the sheriff. You said he took Charlie, but they didn’t. Charlie’s dead, Taylor. I know you don’t want to believe that, but you have to. And I want to know what all that talk about Jake being in the Hollow was and what boy he did something to, because you said no one comes here. I want to know how you can know people but they don’t know you at all.”
Taylor set his spoon down and leaned back in his chair. “I Woke that boy out of love. You’ve a mind to call it sin, well then, fine. But iniquity comes to us all, lady, so the Lord can be who He is. He wishes grace and mercy upon us. Sinnin’s the only way He can give it. As for Jake Barnett, I will not speak on what he did in my Holler. I’ll say only that our paths crossed once and will cross again. Of Charlie, I do not know. But I expect I’m not done seeing him.”
“Why?” Lucy asked.
“Because I did not wake him, and so he still slumbers.” Taylor nodded. “Yes, I will see Charlie again. Only those who get roused are never seen again, as you can imagine. No one dreams once they’re awake, lady. Why would you? You’re in the real world then. That’s why no one comes back. I reckon if someone did, it’d mean this world weren’t a dream a’tall.”
There was more Lucy could have said—wanted to say—but it was all caught up in her like a knot, and to speak would only bind that lump more. Could she blame Taylor for what he’d done to Eric Thayer? Oh yes. But could she blame Taylor for believing his friend Charlie was not dead? When Lucy herself still believed in her secret heart that one morning she would be roused by the feeling of fingers through her hair and open her eyes to her own dead mother? No. And in that way Lucy believed the man across from her hurt just as she herself hurt. She supposed that was why she raised her chin to Taylor and no longer saw the image of a dead boy, but the countenance of one wearied by a long passage. A man whose burden lay unseen but heavy upon him, and whose only hope of continuing on lay in someone who would share his yoke.
Lucy did not see Eric Thayer in Taylor’s face, she saw herself. And in that moment Taylor Hathcock became not the horrid thing he’d done, but the lonely man he was.
“Will you take me to the grove?” she asked. “I want to see it again.”
“I’m bound to watch the town,” Taylor said. “You can go. Mind the way, though, and don’t let this wood enchant you. God’s in this Holler, lady, but so’s the devil. If you come upon either, let ’em know you have no quarrel, just as you heard me say the night I brung you here. And watch the sun. I need you at that meeting tonight, if you’re still of a mind to help me. Kate may be there, and Jake for certain.”
“I’ll go,” Lucy said. Of that she had no doubt. It was what she would tell Taylor o
f Kate and Jake that she still doubted very much.
Lucy rose to leave. She paused at the door to see Taylor smile and to feel herself smiling back. To see them yoked together, as only the hurt could be.
11
The first thing I heard that morning was the wearied voice of Mayor Wallis decreeing both the elementary and high schools would be closed that Monday. So the town could mourn, he said, and if the county school board had a problem with that, they’d goshdarn better bring it on. That was Big Jim—always speaking to the voter instead of the person, always acting tough. I didn’t buy it. Big Jim might publicly say he was keeping everyone home so they could honor the dead and the hurt, but I had a feeling the real reason was that he figured no parents in their right minds would send their children anywhere that day. Not with the devil on the loose.
It was all fine with Zach, of course. No school meant he’d be spared the hassle of making peace with Danny Blackwell, for one. And for another, he’d get to spend a quiet day at the sheriff’s office with Kate and me. We rode from home with him singing from the backseat and Kate holding my hand. She asked if I’d dreamed. I told her no.
Traffic along the way was a steady stream of tractors and trucks and family cars. Their occupants raised a hand as we passed. Kate and I waved back, comforted that at least a portion of the town was endeavoring a return to normal. Then two county police cruisers passed us, reminding us that normal would be awhile yet.
That sentiment only grew when we reached town and found a crowd of bowed heads and shifting eyes waiting in front of the sheriff’s office. Hollis Devereaux stood with one foot on the first step, playing with his beard. Bobby Barnes waited beside him, along with maybe thirty other townspeople I can’t remember. I only glanced at them long enough to know their faces were familiar. It was the unfamiliar face I was looking for. It was Taylor. On the top step, away from the gathering but definitely part of it, stood the Widow Cash. Mayor Wallis marched down the courthouse steps just up Main Street, coming toward us.
