by Billy Coffey
I didn’t know how to react. Humiliation seemed the most appropriate, though in many ways anger felt right too. “Why didn’t you say anything to me?”
“Shame, I reckon,” he said. “Not just mine, knowin’ what you did. Your shame too. Ain’t a person alive don’t carry disgrace.” He lifted his chin to Zach, who traveled with Kate among the gravestones. “Even the boy’ll carry that someday. People say you can let it go or put it down. You heard the preacher’s prayer awhile ago, petitioning the Lord for wisdom to do just that. I don’t think the Lord’ll allow such. That memory, it stains you. All you can do is learn to carry it well. That’s what I hoped for you, Jacob. Because our yesterdays stick.”
“Heaven’s not without the past,” I said.
“What’s ’at?”
“Nothing. Something Phillip said.”
Justus nodded, knowing that expression rang true for his own life. “Your grandpappy used to tell stories of the Holler. He hunted near that black wood often enough and put his name on the gate like us all. He heard things, he said. Saw things. Reckon summa those tales weren’t so tall.” He shook his head at Taylor’s coffin. “Can’t imagine dwellin’ there like that boy did.”
“I think whatever dark lay in the Holler was light compared to the dark already in him.” I reached into my back pocket and drew out Taylor’s book (Phillip’s book, I thought). “Found this on him. Taylor must’ve been carrying it around for years. I’ve been going through it,” I said. “Toward the back. There’s one page he never touched with his scrawls. I figure that one was special to him.”
Justus licked a forefinger and turned the brittle pages, each covered with so many scribbles and erasures it was impossible to make out much. He stopped at the clean page he found. I watched my father’s lips move in silence over the poem. Justus read it once, then again. The third time, he read the first stanza aloud:
“ ‘Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow—You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.’ ” He closed the book and handed it back to me. “I’m afraid fancy words never spoke much to me, Jacob.”
I looked out across the cemetery. Kate and Zach were halfway up the knoll. She let go of his hand long enough to bend to the grass.
“Kate said fella named Poe wrote that,” I said. “She remembers because she had to do a report on him back in school. I figure killing Phillip left a stain on Taylor the way you said memories stain us all. That regret must’ve eat into his heart like a cancer. Guess he found that poem and his mind lit on a way to turn his sin to virtue. I think even before that day behind the bleachers, Taylor’s world was like a picture hanging tilted on a wall. After he killed Phillip, that picture tilted more. Instead of trying to square the corners, he just tilted himself to match it.”
“And the boy?” Justus asked. “Phillip. Come back to what? Set things aright?”
I nodded.
Justus looked out over the mountains. He said, “Grace, then,” recalling his own.
“Grace,” I agreed. “But it’s a grace I mourn all the same. I knew nothing of Phillip other than his name and what we called him, but the light I saw in him told me his soul pointed heavenward when Taylor released it. Can you imagine what it felt to trade heaven for earth, even for a moment? To return to what hell lives past the rusty gate?”
I remembered how the Hollow pressed in as we made our way back. How those woods came alive and grew hungry and how Phillip’s light had faded as he fought.
“It was grace truly, and we were the heirs of it. And it was love. God’s love, yes, but Phillip’s as well. He must have loved us, Justus, for the thing he did. To the heirs of grace, grace is free. But what does grace cost the giver?”
Silence fell as we each pondered that question. Kate and Zach reached the top of the hill. She bent down to Phillip’s grave and laid her notebook there. On top, she placed a bouquet of dandelions.
“Katelyn said you made plans to leave,” Justus said. “Hollis tole me town voted unanimous to let you go on sheriffin’.”
A long pause, then, “I brought Taylor back, everyone saw Lucy Seekins wasn’t with him. All I could say was that she’s missing, and I suppose that’s near enough the truth. Her daddy’s gone. Some trip somewhere, he said. I think a part of him knows he’ll never see his daughter again.” I tilted my head to the knoll. “Kate believes the girl will come back one day. I believe she may be right. I don’t think what Lucy Seekins fell into was a hole at all. I think it’s a door to someplace. Maybe everyplace. Explains a lot of what tends to happen around here. I figure if something can fall in there, something else can fall out. Maybe something worse than the Holler that’s around it. Town needs as many Barnetts as it can hold, and a Barnett sheriff especially.”
Justus’s stone face cracked at those words. What came was a smile. One in need of much practice, but a smile all the same.
“What about you?” I asked. “What will you do?”
“What I must,” he said. “Stand in front of an earthly judge and plead my guilt, just as you did in front of a heavenly one. Mayhap I’ll find that same grace, if God wills it.” Justus put his hand to the scruff on his face. “For now, I should like to go meet my grandson proper, if you and Kate abide it.”
“That’d be just the thing.”
I walked on, meaning to lead my father past Taylor’s body to the knoll where my family waited. Justus remained where we were.
“Jacob?”
I turned to him.
“I love you, son, and I’m proud of you.”
I saw my father’s face and I saw myself, and in the dwindling space between us a small white butterfly passed.
“Love you and proud too, Daddy,” I said.
We walked together to my wife and son beneath an empty sky that touched the floor of heaven. And there among the dead, I returned to the living.
Reading Group Guide
1. The core of this novel deals with the ways Taylor Hathcock and Jake and Kate Barnett live with the sins of their shared past. Taylor has managed to survive the twenty years after Phillip McBride’s death by twisting a rationalization (however flimsy that rationalization is) around it. Kate has spent that time trying to atone for her part in Phillip’s death, attempting to balance that one horrible act with hundreds of loving ones for the town’s poor. For Jake, Phillip’s death is something he tries to keep buried even though it has come to define not only his past, but also his present and future. Given that we are all saddled in some way with having to live with past failures, which of these three characters would you say best describes the manner by which you cope with the past?
2. Phillip tells Jake that heaven is not without the past, hinting that in some way our memories of this world, both good and bad, are preserved in the next. Do you agree with this notion? If so, how would you reconcile the belief of many that heaven contains no remorse? If not, what do you think would be lost when our memories are wiped away?
3. Taylor warns Jake that if Jake doesn’t call the state police away, his sins will be made known not only to the town, but to Kate and Zach as well. Conversely, Taylor says if Jake will simply leave him alone, the secret of what Jake did to Phillip will continue to be Jake’s alone. “They’ll fester on your insides,” Taylor says, “but you’ll live on the outside. Ain’t that what matters to you in the end?” The answer to that is, of course, yes—Jake has clung to that very belief ever since high school. Given his character, do you think Jake would have continued to hide his past if the nightmares had never begun and Taylor had stayed in the Hollow? Do you think Kate would have continued gathering names for her notebook? How do you think this would have affected their marriage as the years went on?
4. My favorite passage to write in The Devil Walks in Mattingly was Zach ruminating on Adam and Eve eating the apple, how
he bet they both spent much time afterward pondering “the good old days.” Yet Zach also believes that Adam and Eve thought about how good that apple tasted many times as well. What do you think Zach meant by this? How does this notion of pleasure play into the sins we commit?
5. In Jake’s final dream, he promises he’ll never return to the Hollow. Phillip replies by saying that God “laughs at what we say we’ll never do.” What do you think that means?
6. Lucy Seekins is perhaps the most tragic character in the book. She chose to leap into the Hole to find her dead mother rather than face a world where she believed no one would love her. What do you think Lucy found on the other side?
7. Jake, Taylor, and Lucy share a similarity in that all three grew up with fathers who were either absent or abusive. What weight, if any, would you place on that as a factor in the sort of people they became? Is it a reason, or an excuse?
8. In your opinion, who really killed Phillip McBride?
Acknowledgments
It’s difficult to know where to start giving thanks for a book like this; so many have done so much. I’ll begin with my wife and children, all of whom have learned over the years that Do Not Interrupt also means It’s Okay To Sneak Into The Office And Lay Your Head On My Shoulder. I love you all, and I couldn’t do any of this without you.
My thanks to Kathy Richards, who keeps a pen-and-paper guy like me functioning in a world of keyboards. To my agent, Rachelle Gardner, who always seems to know just when to call.
I have the pleasure of working with the finest publishing people in the world. Amanda Bostic, Daisy Hutton, LB Norton, Becky Monds, Katy Bond, Laura Dickerson, and Ruthie Dean have shown a continual faith in me that I could never repay. It’s a blessing to call you friends.
And to you, Mr. or Ms. Reader, thank you for picking up this book. I’m hoping the Grandersons have found their peace, at least what peace this life allows. Then again, one never knows what’s waiting on ahead. The road is long, is it not? Long and full of magic.
About the Author
Photograph by Joanne Coffey
Billy Coffey’s critically acclaimed books combine rural Southern charm with a vision far beyond the ordinary. He is a regular contributor to several publications, where he writes about faith and life. Billy lives with his wife and two children in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Visit him at www.billycoffey.com.
