Chapel of Ease

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Did you kill Ray?” The question came out before I could catch it, and it stopped her cold.

  She stared at me. “What in the world makes you ask that?”

  “Given what you people are, what … he was, I assume you were there to tell him if he didn’t cancel the show, he’d be in trouble. And he wasn’t about to do that. So…”

  She seemed really hurt by the accusation. “Look, I don’t know what C.C.’s told you—”

  “I’m not talking about C.C. I saw you in New York, remember? We spoke. Stop pretending it wasn’t you.”

  “—but Rayford was my cousin. We were family. I used to listen to him sing when we were kids and wish I could sing like that.” Her eyes narrowed with genuinely scary anger. “Goddammit, I wasn’t there to hurt him. We just didn’t want him drawing attention to us. We like being here in the middle of nowhere, with nobody bothering us. If C.C. told you anything about us, I know he told you that.”

  A light went on in my head. “But you did have that dreadlocked girl follow him around.”

  She started to dispute this, but then nodded. “I needed eyes on the ground. It’s hard for me to get away with the baby. And she worked cheap. She thought I was some producer looking to get a scoop on the competition.”

  “So if you didn’t kill him, what did he die of?”

  “He died of what they said, I suppose. A brain tumor, right?”

  “Fairies can get brain tumors?” It was a cheap shot, and I knew it as soon as the words left my lips.

  “Most of us are mainly people now!” she snarled through clenched teeth. “We’ve bred with your kind for centuries, millennia. There’s few of us left who are pure Tufa. Ray certainly wasn’t one. But he was sure Tufa where it counted—in his song.” She sucked in a long breath, and when she spoke again, she was calmer. “But that’s not why I wanted to talk to you. You leave tomorrow, right? I want your word that you’ll stay at the Parrishes’ until then. I don’t want you going anywhere you might run into the Durants.”

  “What’ll stop them from coming to the farm? They shot Gerald yesterday.”

  “I know. That’s being dealt with. But this is about you.”

  “You want me to promise I won’t go looking for a fight?”

  “I want you to promise you won’t go anywhere.”

  “Sure, why not?” I said with a shrug.

  She wasn’t that distracted by her grief. “That’s not a yes.”

  “All right, yes. I promise. I’ll stay at the Parrishes’.”

  “No matter what?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, gauging my honesty. At last she nodded, said, “Come on, then, your lunch is getting cold,” and led me back to the Pair-A-Dice.

  She should’ve looked more closely, though, because my fingers were crossed behind my back. In a land where fairies greeted each other with fancy hand gestures, I assumed this childish tradition might still count. It didn’t really matter, though; like a teenager told not to hang out with disreputable friends, I was more determined than ever to get back to the chapel and see what was buried there.

  22

  After lunch, C.C. and I rode silently in his truck until he finally said, “How did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Handle Billy Durant.”

  “Well, I just knew how to hit him right where—”

  “No, I mean, how did you stay so calm? I damn near pissed my pants. I’m not a coward, or at least I don’t think I am, but … we were surrounded. And in case you didn’t know, most of them had guns. I bet Billy even had a gun, he just likes showing off with that knife because he ordered it off a shopping channel.”

  “It’s just … how it works,” I said, struggling to find the words to describe something I’d internalized to such a degree. “A fight is just a technical problem, like repairing a machine is for you. If you get mad or scared, it just makes it harder. Same thing with acting, or dancing; when you’re onstage, you can’t freak out. So you just learn to stay calm.”

  He nodded as if he understood, but I wasn’t sure he did. “When did you learn to do all that?”

  “When I was a teenager. Right after I came out to my parents.”

  “How’d they take it?”

  “They were a little upset at first, but not for the reasons you think. They just knew how hard it would make things for me. Then my dad told me he wanted me to also learn a martial art. He said that people would try to hurt me for no other reason than being what I was, and he wouldn’t always be able to protect me, so I needed to learn to protect myself.”

  C.C. shook his head. “Wow. You’re a lucky guy to have a father like that.”

  “Do your parents know?”

  “I figure everyone knows, but I haven’t officially come out. Does that make me a coward, too?”

  I so wished we weren’t in the truck so I could at least hold him while we talked. “No, man, you’re not a coward. First, when and where and how you do that is entirely your own business, nobody else’s. And second, being afraid is normal. You think I wasn’t afraid with that knife in my face? I was scared shitless, too, let me tell you. Deep down, I was just as afraid as you. Maybe more so: except for you, I don’t really know anyone here who’d care if the Durants cut me into tiny pieces.”

  He smiled a little. “Thorn might shed a tear.”

  We both laughed.

  After another bit of silence, I said, “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It may sound a little loony.”

  He gave me a sideways, you’ve got to be kidding look. “You really think so? After everything I’ve told you?”

  “Good point. It’s about my conversation with Ray. The dream one I told you about.” I related everything about my encounter on the porch, and he listened without comment. When I finished I said, “So, what do you think? Did I really see Ray’s ghost?”

  “In your dream? You can see anything in a dream.”

  “Not just there. When I was singing yesterday, while Bliss was working on patching up Gerald, I closed my eyes for a minute and when I opened them, I thought I saw Ray standing over his father. He looked as real as anyone else. Then he just … disappeared. Like the old man at your fishing hole.”

  “Is that all?”

  Something else occurred to me. “Don, the reporter, got a picture of something that looked like a person standing behind me. It was too blurry to tell for sure, but…” I shrugged.

  C.C. thought this over, then said, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if it’s a ghost?”

  “I don’t know if it’s Ray’s ghost.”

  “It sure looked and sounded like him.”

  “That ain’t always the case. But I know someone who might know.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s a local hoodoo woman. Do you know what that is?”

  “No, but it sounds flamboyant.”

  That made him smile. “Yeah, she can be. Her name’s Azure. She knows about this sort of thing. Haints, and curses, and spells and such. She can tell the future.”

  “She sounds like a witch.”

  “Some might call her that. Nobody around here would, though.”

  “Is she friendly?”

  “She’s … prickly. But she does help people.”

  “Even Yankees?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, even Yankees.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  If I thought the road to the chapel of ease had been rough and untraveled, it was nothing compared to this. We left blacktop, then gravel, then dirt, then what appeared to be two ruts with a grass strip between them, until at last we drove through a small field right up to the edge of thick woods. When we parked, it was next to a huge rock, almost as high as my shoulder, that had symbols carved all over it. There was no sign of a house, or any other human being, and once again I thought about how unlikely it would be for anyone to find my corpse out here.

&nbs
p; We got out of the truck. I had no idea where we were in relation to anyplace else. I asked, “Sure there are no Durants around here?”

  “The Durants wouldn’t come near Miss Azure.”

  I indicated the markings on the stone and asked, “What are these?”

  “Beats me. Not too many people can read that language.”

  The symbols were, in fact, divided as words would be, and some did look like sentences. But they overlapped and went in all directions, making it hard to follow particular lines. Some of the carving was ancient, if the wear on them was any indication, while some looked as sharp and clean as if they had been made last week. “What’s the point of it, then?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say nobody could read it.”

  And that was all the information I was going to get. I followed him around the boulder, up a rise, and along the ridge at the top. The trees were thick, and if there was a trail, I couldn’t see it. I thought of the smug parkour runners who made such a big deal of traversing things like railings and park benches. I wondered how long they’d last in these woods.

  The air was still and muggy, and I was so busy avoiding obstacles that at first I didn’t realize it was dead quiet. But it was: no birds, no insects, no wind. Just our footsteps.

  Suddenly C.C. put his hand on my chest and hissed, “Shh!” Ahead something moved, but the dense trunks blocked my view of it. I tensed, imagining one of the Durants, or some other redneck thug. Then it stepped into the open.

  It was something like a deer. I’d never seen one except at the zoo, and those weren’t nearly the size of this one. Its head rose at least as high as mine, and it sported gigantic antlers that branched into over a dozen thick points. It was backlit by the sun, and seemed to be posing in profile for our benefit. Then it turned and stared at us with the haughty superiority I’d seen in some choreographers.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  “That,” C.C. said equally as softly, “is the king of the forest.”

  Well, he definitely had the crown for it. With one hoof he scraped the ground in front of him. Was he about to charge?

  Other movement caught my eye. Two skinny, doglike creatures walked through the trees, appearing and disappearing as they stalked and circled the deer.

  “Are those wolves?” I asked softly.

  “Coyotes.”

  “Are they going to hurt him?”

  “No, they’re his bodyguards.”

  “Something that big needs bodyguards?”

  “Something that important does.”

  The stag stopped his pawing and studied us for another few moments. Even at this distance, the look in his eye reminded me of the way certain producers looked at you in auditions, fully aware of their power and hoping you were, too, for your own sake. Then he turned and walked away into the forest. His coyote attendants followed.

  In that moment, I glimpsed him between the trees and he seemed to be a man, not a deer, still sporting the enormous antlers. The coyotes were slender young women with dreadlocks and feral grins. Then they were gone.

  “Did you see that?” I asked C.C. very quietly.

  “See what?”

  I let it drop. I was already starting to doubt my own perceptions, since I was seeing (and apparently chatting with) ghosts. Deer men and coyote girls might be the last straw.

  When he was certain the path was clear, C.C. led us farther along the ridge. I looked around for any sign of the deer, but there was nothing. We found an actual trail, marked with bicycle reflectors nailed to tree trunks, that led down the slope into a small hollow between the hills. The trail turned into a kind of rustic sidewalk, paved with smooth, flat stones. It led us to a small cottage.

  At first it reminded me of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Logs formed the walls, and wide wooden shingles covered the peaked roof. Smoke rose from the stone chimney. If seven dwarves had emerged to do the yard work, I’m not sure I would’ve been that surprised.

  Then the non-storybook details announced themselves. Three solar panels gleamed among the wooden roof slats, and a satellite dish was clamped to one corner. I heard music through the small, open windows: Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.”

  C.C. stopped several feet from the door and hollered, “Miss Azure? You home?”

  The music stopped. The door opened and a woman peered out from the dark interior. She had the inevitable black Tufa hair, streaked with silver and tied in a long braid that fell over her shoulder. She was tall and slender, and it was hard to tell her age. She peered over her glasses at us and said, “That must be Cyrus Crow hollering my name.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” C.C. said.

  “Who’s that with you?”

  “Ah, this is my friend Matt. He’s from New York.”

  “How in the world did you meet somebody from New York? You using one of them online dating sites?”

  Well, clearly she knew about him. He laughed and said, “No, ma’am, he was a friend of Rayford Parrish’s.”

  She pondered this for a moment. People around here did that a lot. I suppose most of us could probably stand to think a moment or two before speaking, but I’d never seen it as a cultural norm before. At last she said, “Well, then, y’all come in.”

  As we approached, something poked out beside her feet. It was small, white, and seemed to be grinning. Its mouth was filled with long, sharp teeth.

  I stopped dead. “What is that?” I asked, not caring that I sounded like a wuss.

  She looked down. “Oh, that’s Ketchum.”

  “What is that?”

  “That’s a possum,” C.C. said.

  “Ketchum, you go on, you’re making people nervous.” She nudged the animal with her foot, and it waddled out and across the yard. It wasn’t very big, but it was strange-looking, and its ratlike tail sent a familiar shudder of revulsion through me. I hoped those things never crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and set up in Central Park.

  Her cabin, or cottage, or tiny house, or whatever the hell you want to call it, was dimly lit by natural light through the windows. It smelled of potpourri and cooking vegetables. It was rustic in the extreme, and cluttered with items I couldn’t identify. Many of them appeared to be musical instruments, and from the way they were scattered around the room, they weren’t just there for show. Still, I saw the Spotify screen before she closed her laptop, so she wasn’t any sort of anti-tech Luddite.

  Three cats draped like accent pieces over the old furniture, but thankfully I saw no more possums. A door led to what I assumed was a bedroom, but otherwise the living room, dining room, and kitchen took up one big open space. The table was laden with various drying plants, and something simmered on the stove.

  “Excuse the mess,” Azure said. “I wasn’t expecting company.”

  Aren’t you supposed to be a fortune-teller? I wanted to ask, but all the Southern politeness had rubbed off on me.

  She moved some papers from the kitchen table, stirred whatever she was cooking, and said, “Now—what can I do for you gentlemen?”

  C.C. looked at me. “Matt here thinks he has a haint.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  Stated so baldly, it sounded goofier than I’d expected. “Well…”

  “Have you seen the dead?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Was it someone known to you in life?”

  “Yes.”

  “And has it spoken to you?”

  “I guess. I mean, it—”

  “Sit down,” she said, and gestured at one of the chairs. I sat, and she washed her hands at the sink. “Any other signs?”

  “Uh … not that I know of.”

  “How about omens?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A sign is something that’s supposed to be there but still gets your attention. An omen is something that ain’t.”

  “Ah. Good to know.” I looked over at C.C., who stood patiently by the front door. With his rugged, rustic solidity, he looked like part of the decor.

&
nbsp; “Cyrus, sit down, you’re making me nervous,” Azure snapped. To me, she said, “A haint ain’t always a bad thing. Sometimes they have something important to say, and that’s why they stick around. Did this one tell you anything important?”

  “No, we just … discussed work.”

  “And what kind of work do you do?”

  “I’m an actor.”

  She cocked her head and looked at me oddly. “Well. I ain’t never met a real actor before. You been in anything I might know?”

  “No, I’m mainly a stage actor. In New York.”

  “Broadway?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Ah, so that’s how you know Rayford Parrish.”

  “Yeah. Yes, ma’am,” I corrected quickly.

  “May I see your left hand?”

  I let her take it. “You read palms?”

  “I read signs,” she said without looking up. “Sometimes it’s in a palm, sometimes in tea leaves, sometimes in the way the clouds move.”

  “Must be tiring.” I winced at my own sarcasm.

  She looked up. “You’re trying not to be a smart-ass, son, and I appreciate that, but your snark is still coming out. Why do you believe in medicine?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Why do you believe that when a doctor tells you something, it’s right?”

  “Well, I guess … because it works.”

  “Do you understand how or why it works?”

  “Not really.”

  She tapped my palm with one long finger. “This is the same way. It works. You may not know why or how, I may not know, but it gets results.”

  “It does,” C.C. said.

  That made me smile. “I apologize. I’m a little disoriented by a lot of what I’ve seen the last couple of days, and I tend to fall back on sarcasm when that happens. I’ll try to watch it.”

  She nodded maternally, and I half expected her to muss my hair. “That’s the right thing to say, son. Now, let me see what I can figure out here.”

  She got close to my palm, and I had the absurd idea she might lick it. But she just studied it in light I would’ve thought too dim for such close-up work.

  One of the cats stretched, then hopped down from its perch. I noticed that the many knickknacks hanging from the wall appeared to be mostly small animal skulls, some painted with designs and symbols that, to my untrained eye at least, resembled those on the boulder.