The Devil Walks in Mattingly

by Billy Coffey

  “Harley Ruskin,” she whispered. “He’s a young boy, just about Zach’s age. I went to his house today and left him a box. Clothes mostly, since I thought that’s what he needed most. But I got him a toy and some candy too, because every child should have those.” Kate sniffed. She looked at the headstone in front of her and wished the bones beneath could hear through the earth and rock between them. “It was just a joke, Phillip. That’s all I meant it to be. I’m so sorry.”

  The tears came then, just as they had after all the other boxes delivered to all the other front porches. And just as she had all those other times, Kate prayed that somehow Phillip would hear her words and offer his forgiveness.

  10

  The wooden target out back of the sheriff’s office wasn’t Zach’s alone to use. The path leading to and from had been made by boots much larger than his, just as the deep gashes in the rings of the tree round had been made by one who threw Bessie with much more violence.

  I stood at the head of that worn path now. My eyes blinked against exhaustion and strain as I stared at the target, giving it face after face.

  There was Zach, who would be in school for another hour. With all that weighed on my mind, I still hoped my son had made his peace with Danny Blackwell that day. I hoped he would always make peace and always do the right thing so he would not grow up to lie to the woman and the town he loved.

  Then came Kate, who had gone to the hills carrying both a box and my secret. I didn’t know what she would do with the latter, but I knew she’d use the former to take another step along a road with no end.

  There was Trevor Morgan, who had done more to harm Mattingly in the last days than any devil.

  My father was next, the almost-murderer who had come down from the mountains and claimed my place as town protector, and who in many ways had haunted me more than Phillip McBride ever could.

  There came Taylor, who knew what I had done to Phillip in the Hollow the day Kate played her trick. The face I saw there was more a rendering and based solely upon Timmy Griffith’s description, but it was Taylor enough. His picture settled into the contours of the wood. My fingers twitched at my right side, wanting to move. It could not. That image was not real, yet I was as afraid of it as I was everything else.

  Taylor’s likeness stretched out to the edges of the target and faded. I blinked, not understanding the image my mind conjured next. The skin on this face was gaunt and sallow. Dark, wide eyes stared out from beneath a black hat, cutting first right and then left, searching not for something to find but somewhere to hide. It was the face of a man stranded in a fate of his own making, caught by a rising tide upon slippery rocks.

  My hand moved before that picture could change. I reached behind my back and drew the tomahawk forward, flipping the handle in the air and catching it behind my right shoulder in one smooth motion.

  Bessie flew. Her arc held true, the blade cleaving the air between me and the target in mere seconds, striking the small space in the wood I saw as the drawn brows over my own eyes. The iron head lodged itself there to the hilt.

  “Not bad.”

  I looked to the door. My right arm crossed my body, frozen in the throw’s follow-through. Justus’s body took up nearly all of the doorway. The only bits of light that leaked out from the office came through the tiny slits above his head and the spaces between his arms and sides.

  “Reckoned I’d find you here,” he said, and then he smiled in a way that told me he was both proud and disappointed that he’d guessed right.

  I straightened and asked, “What are you doing here, Justus? Bobby Barnes get tired of chauffeuring you around?”

  “No.” He turned his body and eased into the grass. “Sent’m home. All of ’em. Start again tomorrow. Where’s Katelyn?”

  I walked to the target and pried Bessie from the wood. “Had an errand to run.”

  “And your boy?”

  “School. State your aim.”

  I brought Bessie back up the path. Justus waited for me there.

  “Come to make peace,” he said.

  “You want peace, go on back to the Gap. Leave us be.”

  Justus looked at Bessie. “Why? So I can leave you to play while a murderer goes free?”

  “Taylor Hathcock’s not your responsibility.”

  He thumped me in the chest, daring me to do something. “That’s right, he’s yours. I ain’t runnin’ off again. Did that once, look where it got me. Right back here. Fate or the Lord’s will, Jacob, take your pick. You want me to go? Arrest me.”

  Justus held out hands so big I thought handcuffs would never get around them even if I tried. His shadow covered me.

  “You know what you did goes beyond this town,” I told him. “State and county want you, not me.”

  I wheeled and fired. The crack of blade meeting wood echoed off the walls. The corners of Justus’s mouth rose and his eyes lit, but he said nothing. I walked to the target. “Why are you doing this? Why are you here? This town gave you a way out seven years ago. John David had the badge, but he never looked for you. Town wouldn’t let him because they thought you were in the right, and I believe he felt the same, though he never said it. Even Big Jim let you go.”

  “Jim Wallis got what he wanted,” Justus said. “I’m the only one that man’s afraid of. He didn’t get the farm or his strip mall, not yet, but he managed to chase me from Mattingly. Town wouldn’t let him chase another Barnett. That’s why they gave you the badge, Jacob. An’ they mean you to use it. To keep the peace, within this town and without it.”

  I pried Bessie from the wood and said, “Go find Alan Martin in Stanley. Turn yourself in to him, but don’t come to me. I’m your son.”

  “That’s why I’m doin’ it,” he roared.

  I froze halfway to him. Justus stared at me, jowls straining and cheeks flushed, then he looked away. I believe he saw my fear and was ashamed. Whether that embarrassment was because of the way I’d reacted or because he’d made me react that way, I didn’t know. But I knew that all men, no matter how tall and wide they get or how much gray sits atop their heads, are still boys inside.

  “I look to heaven an’ feel hell, boy,” he said. “I’m plagued by those men I shot. It’s the livin’ that haunt me, not the dead. You too. You haunt me too.

  “Your momma took my heart with her to the grave; I’d none left to raise you up with. Her passin’ broke you just as much, an’ I couldn’t put you together again. You’re weak on the inside, boy. I been waitin’ up to the Gap for years, hopin’ you’d come get me. I knew you never would. You spent your whole life sittin’ down. But I knowed the day’d come when you’d have to stand up, and that time is now.

  “Town needs you out there lookin’ for Taylor Hathcock, not here pitchin’ Bessie. They’re grumblin’, Jacob. I hear it. You bring me in, it shows them people you’re a Barnett. It shows them you can stand. That’s why I cain’t turn m’self in and that’s why it’s gotta be you. You were the only one to speak agin’ me when those bank men came. I shoulda listened to you then, but I dint know.”

  “Know what?”

  Justus slipped his hands into his pockets and sighed. It was a small gesture, one I saw every day from a hundred different people and for a hundred different reasons. It was the sign of a man about to say there was no rain for his fields or a woman about to speak of a child who’d run off to the city with the wrong boy or girl. It was a precursor to talk of the mysteries of life and the balefulness of the world.

  “Some choices you live with only once,” he said. “Others you hang on to forever. Took me seven years to learn that lesson, but learn it I have. I’m tired, Jacob. This world’s no home for the weary.”

  I stood there staring, not believing what I’d heard. All the people in the world, and it had been Justus who’d gotten a look into my own soul. Not Kate, not anyone else. Justus. And yet all I could do was walk the rest of the way up the path and say, “I’m busy.”

  Justus lowered his head and flash
ed a bitter smile. When he looked up, his face held the same stony expression I’d known all my life. It was the one my father had worn when he said my momma was dead. It was there again when I was fifteen and he’d dipped so far into Hollis’s brew that he hit me. That was the day I wiped the blood from my lip (it was a cut just like the one Zach got, I remembered; that same jagged line from my mouth to my nose) and said I was going to finish school and leave Mattingly, leave the farm, but most of all, leave him.

  That look had been there the day I returned from the Hollow with my arm torn and my jeans streaked with my own blood. After Justus wanted to know what had happened and I was too afraid to answer with the truth.

  It had been there the day Sheriff Houser begged my father to run and I’d told him to stay, to face his failures in the way I’d never faced my own. And it had been there as Justus became a fugitive and I said he would be a stranger to his family.

  “Goin’ north t’morrow,” he said. “After that we’ll go house to house if we hafta. Got more men comin’. Preacher Goggins says he’ll get every able body in church t’help. You won’t find that man, Jake, we will. And then he’ll ’fess. He’ll ’fess to everythin’.”

  Justus turned to go. I gripped Bessie and fired at the target. This time the blade made a quarter turn too many. The head met the rounded hunk of oak and bounced harmlessly to the grass.

  Justus looked back long enough to say, “Good thing about a tree? It don’t kill you if you miss.”

  11

  Taylor knew where Lucy had gone as soon as she sat beside him. It was the smile on her face—a wide, contented grin Taylor could never coax from her but the Hole always managed to grow there. He put the binoculars down and looked at her.

  “When we were driving up here the other night,” Lucy said, “I had no idea where I was going. Some of those streets were ones I never even knew were there. I thought you knew them because you grew up in town. But that’s not true, is it? You knew those streets because all you do is sit up here and look.”

  “You’re a bright one, lady,” he said.

  “Why though? I mean, you can do anything. You don’t need to work, you don’t have any responsibilities. You’re the freest person I’ve ever known, but you’re chained to this old log.”

  “I’m seeking Her,” Taylor said.

  “Kate.”

  “That’s right.”

  As if to underscore that point, Taylor lifted the binoculars again. The night was coming on and there was little to see, but that didn’t matter. He had never let the thought that he was blind to what he saw get in the way of truth.

  “You told me she said she loved you,” Lucy said. “I need to know more.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I do.”

  “She played a trick on me long back.” He kept the spyglasses up, not wanting Lucy to see what might be written on his face. “She told me she loved me, but she played a trick instead. There was trouble with a boy because of it. Jake played his own part.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Taylor winced from behind the lenses and said, “Blessing, I mean. There was blessing because of it.”

  “Who was the boy?”

  Taylor shook his head. “My time down there was short. Dint know his name. Jake and Kate, now? I knew them. Everybody knew them.”

  “What kind of trick was it?” Lucy asked.

  “A mean one,” Taylor said. “Ain’t no other kind. She told me she loved me and she tricked me for sport. Tricked the boy too. Tricked us both. Kate Griffith saw to his end, and Jake stood idle. But I saved that boy.”

  “What do you mean Kate saw to his end?” Lucy asked. “How’d you save the boy?”

  Taylor shook his head. A blessing, he thought, ’twas a blessing. He tried to convince himself that was so even as memories pulled him back to that day along the riverbank and the sight of the flint knife in his own hand and Jake Barnett rounding the bend. He took the binoculars away, tried to chase away that remembrance, and when he did he thought for a moment there were three people on the rotten log instead of two, there was him and there was Lucy and there was also another, a boy in short jeans and a hooded red sweatshirt, but Taylor’s heart begged him to remember no more, and the three of them became two again.

  “How’ve you spent your day, lady?” he asked. “You thought on what I told you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  “What’s he call himself? Or is it a her?”

  “A him. His name’s Hollis Devereaux.”

  Taylor nodded. He didn’t know a Hollis Devereaux and thought he wouldn’t. “Have you dealings with this man?”

  “No,” she said, “I know him, though. What he does. I promised myself I’d see to him if I ever got the chance.”

  “Do you love him enough to set him free?” Taylor asked.

  “I’ll set him free.”

  “Such promises are easy to make and hard to keep, Lucy Seekins. You’d do well to know that.”

  “This is my home now,” Lucy said. “I’ll do what I have to do to stay.”

  Taylor looked down over the town again, which was now dark but for tiny specks of light downtown.

  “You cannot take my blade,” he said. “It’s precious to me and holds a power you can’t wield. Gun’s cleaned and loaded, though. Can you shoot?”

  “A boy taught me how once,” Lucy said. “His name is Johnny. Or was. He’s gone now.”

  Taylor asked, “Are you sure you have this in you, lady?”

  Lucy smiled. He saw it was not a pretty smile, more like a bobcat’s just before it pounced.

  “I’ve never been as sure of anything in my life, Taylor. He’ll be in his woods. I know where they are. I’ll find him. If it takes forever, I’ll find him.”

  Taylor knew that was true. What he didn’t know is if the lady beside him would succeed. It took love to Wake someone, but all he saw in Lucy Seekins was hate.

  “Besides,” Lucy said, “none of this is real anyway. Right?”

  Taylor didn’t answer. All he said was, “Tomorrow. It’ll be tomorrow.”

  12

  Zach Barnett may have been only six and fuzzy on if there really were pots of gold at the ends of rainbows or where babies came from, but he knew when his parents were fighting. It wasn’t so much that things got louder around the house, it was more they got quieter. That night the silence held such a presence that he felt it was a living thing.

  The air itself carried a charge like lightning that could strike anywhere at any time. Zach felt one of those bolts when his daddy snapped at him for not wanting to take a bath. He caught one from his momma when he bucked at doing his homework. It was the heavy clink of ice in their glasses during an otherwise soundless supper and his vain attempts at conversation that were met with stares and grunts. Not even Zach’s news that he’d sat with Danny Blackwell at lunch and turned half his peanut butter and banana sandwich into a peace offering raised so much as an eyebrow. He repeated it twice, but neither one of his parents heard him.

  They didn’t happen often, these fights. Zach was thankful for that. His teachers at school had yet to instruct him in many things (pots of gold and how babies got in women’s stomachs among them), but his classmates had taught Zach plenty about divorce. No fewer than three of the kids in his first-grade class had mommies and daddies who didn’t love each other anymore, and all three shared the belief that seeing your folks fight was much like seeing a red sky in the morning—it meant bad weather was coming.

  Zach didn’t think his folks were headed down that road. They most always got along. They laughed at each other’s jokes and held hands and kissed a lot, and sometimes the three of them would get into wrestling matches on the floor. Zach didn’t know a lot, but he knew about fighting and fun. He figured that if you put those two together, that made love.

  So that night Zach did what every child would do—he kept his head down and his mouth closed, and weathered the storm. He didn�
��t ask to throw Bessie in the backyard and didn’t complain when his momma said it was bedtime, and he found his grace in believing the next day would be better because tomorrow never had any hurt in it yet. When you’re six, such things are easy to believe.

  His momma still read him a bedtime story, and his daddy still ended the night by telling Zach he was proud of him and loved him. At least there was that. If his daddy had left that part out, Zach really would have started worrying about divorce.

  Yet he couldn’t fall asleep. It was everything that had happened in town. He understood this even if his parents had told him little. The kids at school had talked plenty about what had happened in town that week. After their peace had been made and the peanut butter and banana sandwich eaten, Danny Blackwell had told Zach it was a zombie that had hurt Andy, Timmy, and that boy named Eric. Knew it for a fact, Danny said, “Because I sawed it on the TV and zombies eat braiiins.” Zach didn’t believe that for a minute (though he did pause to consider if there really was a brain-hungry zombie loose in Mattingly, Danny Blackwell would be the safest person in the whole town). He knew the one who had done those bad things had been just a man.

  And yet to Zach, that notion was much scarier. He would have preferred the zombie. Because if it really had been just a man who had upended Zach’s town, that meant his Uncle Timmy and Mr. Andy and that boy Eric hadn’t been set upon by a monster, they’d been hurt—and killed, Zach knew that and didn’t need Danny to tell him—by someone as normal as himself.

  He knew about bad people. Reverend Goggins had told Zach how Adam and Eve were good until the devil talked Eve into eating that apple, after which Adam wanted his own bite. That’s when everything went to pot, because that’s when Adam and Eve looked down and saw they didn’t have any clothes on. That’s when sin started, the preacher said, and Zach always thought that must’ve been an awful thing to witness. He also figured he couldn’t blame Adam and Eve for eating that apple. Experience had taught him people tend to want a lot of things, and the things they’re not supposed to have especially. He had no doubt everyone’s original parents had a rough go from then on. On those dark nights like the one he was mired in now, Zach would sometimes think about Adam trying to keep the weeds out of his crop and Eve hollering because it hurt so bad when those babies came out of her stomach and how they both must have spent a lot of time thinking on the good old days. But he bet they probably thought on that apple plenty too, and how good it tasted.