by Faith Hunter
So he yelled at their retreating backs.
“God damn you all to burning Hell.”
It wasn’t obscene, but it was blasphemous.
That was not the really bad word Neb used. That was still percolating in his chest.
Mrs. Carter came running out and threatened to cuff those words right out of him. She said it was the Devil himself speaking out of him like that, and she raised that little Bible she always carried as if it was the hand of God ready to strike him down.
“But they took my Pa,” he protested, trying not to sound like a little boy. Trying to sound like he was Big Tom’s only son.
His plea hadn’t softened Mrs. Carter much. She lowered her Bible, though, and gave him a pitying look.
“And the Devil’s been in his soul since he was your age, young Neb,” she said in a voice of iron. “Now I hear the word of Satan falling from your lips.” She shook her head and pressed the leather-bound book to her skinny breast.
“They took him, ma’am,” said Neb, and the tears were in his voice if not yet in his eyes. “They had no right to take him.”
Saying that did something to Mrs. Carter. She lowered the Bible and walked up to him, standing face to face with him. Although she was a full-grown woman and Neb was young, he was two inches taller. Somehow, though, he felt much smaller, and she seemed to tower over him. A thin scarecrow of a woman with sticks for arms and eyes the color of dust. Straw-dry hair pulled back into a bun that looked so tight it had to hurt, and a black dress with a white apron that flapped and snapped in the east wind.
“Listen to me, Nebuchadnezzar Howard,” she said in a voice that was only slightly louder than the whisper of the breeze over the tall grass, “it’s not your fault that you were born to such a family. A whore for a mother and a lawless devil of a father.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, but his voice was nothing, too small to be heard.
“We are all sinners,” she said. “We are born with the sins of Adam and Eve painted on our hearts. They betrayed the trust of God, and therefore we are all born in the shadow of that crime. All we can ever hope for is to find acceptance in the Lord and to beg for him to rescue us from the Pit.”
“N-no…”
Mrs. Carter raised the hand holding the Bible and pointed with one bony finger at the group of riders that had dwindled down to specks.
“Evil is born unto evil as sin is born out of sin. Your father is a monster. A killer of men who has known the inside of every whorehouse west of Laramie. He has blood on his hands, oh yes he does. And as Adam’s sins were passed down to his children, so are the sins of Thomas Howard passed unto you. Your soul must bear that weight, and it is up to you to find a way to expunge this guilt.” She bent close and he could smell apples and bread yeast on her breath. “You stand at the very brink of Hell, Neb. Take one step and you will burn, like your mother burns now, and like your father will surely burn when they slip that noose around his neck. Mark me, child. Mark what I say.”
“You’re crazy,” said Neb. “Ma used to say you were, and Pa said it all the time. You’re crazy as a barn owl and twice as ugly.”
Mrs. Carter’s eyes flared as wide as an owl’s right about then.
And before Neb could say another word of sass, she slapped him across the face. Not with her hand, but with the black leather-bound holy book she always carried. She was as skinny as a hickory pitchfork handle, but she was as tough as one, too. The blow caught Neb square on the side of the face, and it sent him crashing against the post rail. He rebounded and dropped to his knees in front of her like a sinner in church.
That’s when Neb said the bad word. The barnyard word.
“Fuck you!” he screamed.
The words seemed to roll away from his mouth, blow past Mrs. Carter like a hot wind, tumble all the way to the distant line of mountains and come echoing back. And as they did his shouted words sounded like they were in his father’s voice and not Neb’s own.
Mrs. Carter stared at him with eyes as wide as saucers, and as he watched, Neb saw a strange expression come over her. Or, a series of them that pulled onto her face and then moved on, like cars in a locomotive. First there was blank shock, and then horror, then righteous indignation, and finally a smile crept onto her mouth. It was one of the ugliest smiles Neb had ever seen. Cruel and triumphant and delighted, as if she had waited all her life for just this moment, and now that it was here, with the proof of his sinful corruption still burning in her ears, her life’s mission was complete. She seemed so incredibly pleased to have her certainties confirmed. Mrs. Carter pointed the Bible at him the same way his Pa would point at someone with his gun.
“You are going straight to Hell,” she said in a tight whisper. “You will burn in eternal hellfire where you belong.”
Neb Howard got slowly to his feet. His cheek hurt and his face burned and tears stung his eyes. He wanted to break down and sob, and he knew there would be time for that, but he would die first rather than give her that kind of satisfaction.
“You’re always telling people that they’re going to Hell,” he said. “I heard you say that to half the people in town. You think everybody’s going to Hell. Or maybe you think they all deserve to go there ’cept you.” He took a step toward her and there must have been something in his voice or in his face, Neb couldn’t be sure, but Mrs. Carter flinched backward half a step. “If everybody you ever told to go to Hell ever did, then it would be full to busting. All the people down there and you up here. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She straightened and tried to reclaim her power. “It would be the fitting justice of the Lord. I pray for all you sinners every day.”
“Well, I’ll tell you this much,” said Neb, “maybe you’d better pray real good because it’d be my guess that Hell’s going to get mighty full. And all them sinners down there will be remembering who sent ’em down to burn.”
He took another step.
“And I wonder what’ll happen with there’s no more room in Hell, Mrs. Carter.” He smiled and Neb knew it was a bad smile. It hurt his face to smile like that. “What do you think will happen then?”
She held the Bible out between them as if it could protect her from him and his sinful words.
Neb looked from the book to her and back down at the book. Then he hocked phlegm from deep in his throat and spat at the Bible she held. It was a big green glop that struck the black leather and splashed on her bony fingers.
The woman screeched like a crow and immediately wiped the spittle off on her apron, then pawed at the leather to insure that it was clean. She made small mewling sounds as she did so. Neb stood there and slowly dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. He studied the glistening wetness for a moment, then he looked up at her again.
“It’s getting dark,” he said. “You better run home now.”
It was still early in the day. The darkness, he knew, was in her soul and in his heart.
Mrs. Carter backed up all the way to the road, then she turned and ran home. Only when she was halfway up the footpath to her own front door did she turn and shake the Bible at him and shout something. But Neb turned away, shutting out the sight of her and anything she had to say.
2
It was a long, bad day.
For a long time Neb sat on a hard wooden chair in the kitchen, surrounded by the silence of an empty house, and waited for something to happen. A thought, an idea, a plan. A hope.
Nothing.
His heart hurt and his head felt like it was full of hornets. His thoughts buzzed and stung him.
Ten different times he got up to head outside to saddle his horse, Dunders, and once even had the saddle on and the straps buckled. But then he unsaddled the old horse and trudged back to the house, knowing that his presence in town wouldn’t do his father any good. There were a lot of stories about Big Tom and though many of them were wild, Neb suspected that most of them were true. Even if half of them were lies and the other half exaggerated it still meant that hi
s Pa was a bad man.
A sinner.
Neb thought of this as he sat in the house, wrapped in shadows that rose up, towered over him, and fell crashing down as the sun moved through the sky and threw light in through the windows. The truth was a hard thing to know. Knowing it made it hard for Neb to breathe sometimes. Not just then, but at nights in his bed when he heard Big Tom downstairs weeping or yelling, raving drunk. Telling bad truths to the night and whispering into his whiskey bottle.
Neb knew that it was what happened to Ma that turned his father bad. Ruined him. That was probably the better way to think about it. Mrs. Carter and the ladies at church had a lot to do with that. With what happened to Ma and what Pa turned into.
It was on account of the baby.
Neb’s little sister, Hannah, had only lived long enough to cry once and then she stopped crying, stopped wriggling around, stopped breathing. Neb had been eight when it happened. He’d seen stillbirths before, it happened a lot on a farm. And there were birthing deaths in town, too. The Pederson twins both died, and Mrs. Sykes died along with her sixth kid. It happens, and even as young as he was Neb Howard was old enough to know that life was hard and life was fragile. Dying came easy out here. Maybe it was different in the big cities back East, but not out here. There was sickness and there were all sorts of dangers. Fires and ranch accidents, flash floods and all sorts of things. Death walked everywhere and there was no one who didn’t know the sound of the Reaper’s voice.
But with Ma it had been bad.
She’d been sickly for a long time, having never really recovered from a sickness that cut through this whole region. The influenza Neb thought it was called. That was the word people used, though Mr. Flambeau who owned the livery called it the grippe It gripped all right, Neb knew. It grappled hold of people from Sadler’s Fork to Indian Pass, and by the time that winter passed there were probably a thousand new graves dug in the soil in the shade of these mountains. Ma had almost been one of them, but even though she lingered there on the edge she came back. It was Pa who brought her back. Sitting by her side every night, holding her hand, praying to God and to her for her to come back, come back, come back to him. That’s what he said, and Neb was sure he heard his father say those words ten thousand times.
Come back. Come Back. Come back to me.
And even though she’d looked like death lying there with sweat-soaked hair and gray skin and hardly no breath at all, Ma came back. Slowly. Maybe reluctantly. But when Pa called her she came back.
She was never the same after that, though.
Neb once heard Mr. Flambeau say to his wife that ‘Meg Howard looked like death warmed up.’ And Mrs. Schusterman over at the general store said that she looked like a ghost.
Neb thought she looked like an angel, and sometimes at night he wondered if maybe Ma HAD died and it was her angel that had come back. Ma was so gentle, so soft, so quiet after the sickness. And she was always fragile as butterfly wings. She rarely went out in the bright sun and could not abide loud noises. She left the heavy farm work to Neb and his Pa.
Neb missed the old Ma. He missed her laughter and her energy. He missed the Ma who could bake a dozen pies at Christmas and decorate the house and the big tree in the yard and do it all with a smile. After the sickness he never saw that Ma again. Instead it was the angel.
Then she got pregnant. Even as a kid Neb understood about that. This was a farm after all. She got pregnant and every day, the bigger she got the sicker she looked. It was as if the baby growing in her belly was draining all the life force from her. Like a tick sucking on blood.
Neb grew to hate the baby.
At first, anyway.
Later he realized that he was just afraid of what the baby was going to do to Ma by the time she came to term.
Then that night came, and it was as if the doors of Hell had been cracked open. The midwife came and so did some of the ladies from town. Even Mrs. Carter came over, drawn by the sound of Ma’s terrible screams.
Neb tried to hide from those screams. First in his room, then in the barn. The horses were spooked by the sound, and they screamed, too.
It lasted all through the night and only around dawn did the screaming stop.
Neb, exhausted from a night of hiding and crying and praying for it all to end, heard the silence. That’s how he remembered it. He heard the silence.
He crawled out from beneath the pile of hay he’d pulled over him, and crept out of the barn and stood looking at the house. He knew something was wrong. He knew that just looking at the house. It stood wrong against the dawn light. It seemed tighter, threatening. The gables and windows and everything seemed to be clutched into a fist. Ready to punch him. Ready to hurt him.
The silence was awful.
So awful.
Neb came up onto the porch and saw that the door stood open. It was never left open.
The living room was empty and messy. That was wrong, too. Ma always kept the house neat as a pin. Everything dusted, everything in its place. Neat and tidy and snug and comfortable.
Now chairs were in the wrong place and the hall rug was rumpled and there was a whiskey bottle standing nearly empty on the table. No glass. As if Pa had been drinking from the bottle itself. Was that the haystack pa hid under, he thought. It was a thought too old for a kid, but he thought it anyway and knew it to be the truth.
Climbing the stairs was the hardest thing Neb ever did. So hard and it took forever. The effort of lifting his leg to place the flat of his shoe on each riser was harder than lifting fence rails.
Then he was upstairs, down the hall, standing at the open door to his parents’ room. It was as far as he would go. It was as far as he could make himself go. He stood with his hands on the doorframe and stared into a scene from Hell itself.
The town ladies standing around, each of them looking sad or shocked or horrified. All of them looking worn down. Ma was on the bed, but the bed was wrong. So wrong. It was painted in red. Splashed in red. Drenched in red.
Pa stood holding something. A tiny form whose legs and arms drooped down from the edges of his palms. It, too, was red.
Ma lifted a pale, blood-spattered hand toward the thing that Pa held.
“My baby…,” she said in a ghost of a voice. “Give me my baby.”
Pa did not move.
Ma pulled at the neck of her sodden dressing gown, tearing it down, exposing one breast. “I have to feed my baby. Give her to me. Can’t you hear how hungry she is?”
Mrs. Carter said, “You should have called Brother Taylor when I told you to, Tom Howard.”
Pa lifted his head and Neb saw that there was no trace of comprehension in his red-rimmed eyes. “W-what…?”
“I told you that this would happen,” said Mrs. Carter. “I told you that you needed the parson to come out here and baptize the child before…”
She let her words trail off, the meaning clear.
“Where’s my baby?” cried Ma.
“Only those baptized in the blood of the lamb can ever hope to go to Heaven,” said Mrs. Carter. “Only those blessed by the Lord can hope to escape the fires of Hell.”
Pa clutched the still form to his chest and sank slowly down to his knees, broken as much by what had happened as by those dreadful words.
“Give me my baby,” said Ma. “Little Hannah is so hungry.”
He bent forward and laid the infant on the bed, let Ma take her, watched as Ma pressed the slack mouth to her nipple. Saw the smile on Ma’s face.
“There she is,” said Ma. “See how hungry she is?”
Those words beat Pa further down. He buried his face in the bloody sheets and wrapped his arms over his head. That’s when Neb heard those words again.
“Come back,” whispered Pa. “Come back. Come back to me.”
But Hannah hadn’t come back.
And as Neb stood there he saw Ma’s eyes close and her smile slowly fade. It did not go away completely. Not even when she stopped breathing. Not even w
hen Pa began to scream.
That was how Pa went wrong. Neb knew it for sure.
The preacher came out at noon, but Mrs. Carter met him on the porch and she had the same triumph in her eyes that day as she had this morning.
“I told Tom Howard to send for you while there was still time,” she said. “Now look what he’s done. That poor baby is lost for good and all.”
Neb stood holding his Pa’s hand, and he felt his father’s grip tighten and tighten as they waited for the parson to refute those words, to say different, to say that Hannah was going to Heaven. To say that it didn’t matter than she hadn’t been baptized.
But the preacher only took Mrs. Carter’s hand and patted it. “I’ll say a prayer.”
That was all he said and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t near enough by a country mile.
Pa nearly broke Neb’s hand by squeezing it so hard. If it had been a day later, Neb was sure Pa would have gone charging off the porch and punched them both. It if had been a month later he’d have taken a horsewhip to them.
If it had been this year, Pa would have shot them both sure as God made green apples.
Now Pa was gone. Dragged out of bed, beaten and slung across the back of a horse. Now he was in jail. And maybe he was going to wherever Ma and little Hannah had gone. Into the ground. Up to Heaven? Or, if Mrs. Carter and the parson were right, then down to Hell.
Neb huddled inside the rough blanket of his own hurt and wondered what to do.
3
He summoned the courage to ride into town that afternoon. The sun was tumbling behind the hills, throwing long purple shadows in his path. Dunders, who was an old and trailwise horse, seemed uneasy by the coming twilight and Neb had to yank on the reins and kick him a few times to keep the horse headed to town. Though in his head Neb understood and even sympathized.
“I don’t want to go, either,” he told the horse when they were halfway there. “But we gotta find out what’s happening to Pa.”
Dunders blew out a breath that was almost a sigh of resignation and plodded on. It was nearly full dark by the time they reached the outskirts of town, and Neb knew at once that something was wrong. Bad wrong. There were lights everywhere. Torches and lanterns. He could hear voices shouting and even some gunshots popping. Mrs. Carter’s rickety old dogcart with her rickety old horse, Ahab, was tied to a post. He saw the parson’s half-breed Appaloosa tethered next to it.
