Chapel of Ease

by Alex Bledsoe

  At last Azure sat up and said matter-of-factly, “You’ve got yourself a haint, young man. And let me guess: it’s young Mr. Rayford.”

  “Yeah. So what do I do?”

  “Listen to it. Find out what it wants and give it to it.”

  “I would, but I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “You think a haint can’t follow you to the big city?”

  “I spoke with it last night. Well, early this morning. We had an actual conversation. It didn’t mention anything about needing something from me.”

  “Then it ain’t ready to tell you, or you ain’t ready to hear.”

  This was all needlessly cryptic. “Okay, suppose I don’t want to have a haint. Is there a way to get rid of it? Besides giving it what it wants?”

  “Become a haint yourself.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  She laughed. “C.C., take your friend home, or wherever he’s staying. I suspect tonight’s going to be pretty eventful for him, so he might want a nap.”

  “That’s all?” I said.

  “Hey, it’s your haint, not mine. But if you’re leaving tomorrow, and what the haint wants from you is here, then a lot’s going to happen real soon. Or…” She trailed off with a shrug.

  “Or what?” I pressed.

  “Or you ain’t gonna be leaving anytime soon.”

  I stood up. “Thank you,” I said uncertainly.

  Azure nodded. C.C. made a hand gesture at her, which she returned. As we stepped out the door, I said, “We saw a great big deer on our way in. C.C. said it was the king of the forest. Is that a sign or an omen?”

  She cocked her head, suddenly a lot more interested. “Did you, now. Cyrus, were you planning to mention that?”

  “I didn’t think it—”

  “Do you know nothing about reading signs, even after all this time?” To me she said, “That was an omen, young man.”

  “Does that change things?”

  “It doesn’t change it, son, but it ratchets it up. The king don’t come out for just anyone rambling through the woods. He must think one of you is a big deal.”

  “It can’t be me,” C.C. said.

  “No, it don’t seem likely, given everything else swirling around this boy.” She looked at my face so closely, I expected her to squeeze a blackhead off my nose. “I reckon the message this haint has for you ain’t just for you, son. It’s bigger than that if the king is concerned. You best try to find out what it is before something bad happens.”

  “To me?”

  “Or someone close to you.”

  “I don’t think Ray would—”

  “Haints ain’t always what they look like. Might not be your friend. Might be a palimpsest of your friend—you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s like a sketch of your friend, drawn over your memories. It can fool you into thinking you’re talking to him, but all you’re talking to is a determination strong enough to come out of the grave to get something done.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Most of the time I don’t, either,” she said with a laugh. “Y’all be careful, now. Bless your hearts.”

  * * *

  We drove—or rather, bounced—in silence until we got back onto the actual paved highway. Azure’s bizarre warnings rattled in my head in the same way I did in the truck’s cab.

  “Should we have paid her?” I asked. “Or at least offered?”

  “She don’t do this for money,” C.C. said. “She’s a professor at East Tennessee State.”

  “She’s a college professor?”

  “World-renowned folklore expert, if you can believe it. Wrote three books so far.”

  “I guess you never can tell about people.”

  “That’s the pure-D truth.”

  At last, when the ride was finally smooth again, I turned to C.C. and said, “I have to go back to the chapel tonight. I have to find out what’s buried there. You can call me crazy if you want, but I know I’ll hate myself if I go back to New York without at least trying.”

  “Do you think that’s what the haint wants?”

  It was the exact opposite of what Ray wanted, but I wasn’t going to let a ghost dictate to me. But then again, Azure had hinted at the possibility that this ghost might not really be Ray after all. If it wasn’t, then perhaps finding the secret was what the real Ray, the dead one, actually did want. Still, I was sure of one thing. “It’s what I want.”

  “Are you asking for my help?”

  “I am. I have to know. It’s a secret that Ray never got to tell, and if that dream ghost was real, it’s one he never meant to tell. He was going to weasel out of his promise to tell us.”

  “So it’s revenge?”

  “It’s … balance. We’re bringing his world to life. He was wrong not to tell us. Even if no one else ever finds out, we deserve to know.”

  C.C. frowned as he mulled that. “So can a bunch of actors keep a secret?”

  I thought of the great skein of gossip woven by actors in a company. “That’s a separate issue. So … will you help? Will you take me back?”

  “After being threatened with a knife, and Gerald being shot, and a haint telling you not to, you want to sneak back onto the Durants’ land?”

  “I do.”

  “And dig up something that may not actually be there.”

  “You saw the spot. Something’s there.”

  “I saw a bare patch of ground inside a ruined building. It could just be because the sun never quite hits that spot, so nothing grows.”

  “Could be. Only one way to find out.” I took his right hand and kissed the back of it. “Come on. After all this, you know you want to know, too.”

  He drove some more, then said, “All right. But we’re not going in there all haphazard like we did before. We need a plan.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m in charge. If I say we’re done before we get what you want, then we’re done.”

  “Agreed.”

  He turned to me and smiled at last. “And when it’s over, you better make it worth my while.”

  “That I can promise,” I said.

  23

  The afternoon took forever to go by. With nothing to do, I was aware of every … creeping … moment, and it was maddening. I tried to nap, but between anticipation of the night raid on the chapel, and the worry (okay, fear) that Ray might show up in my dreams again, that wasn’t going to happen. C.C. went off to fix the tractor, abandoned in the field yesterday when Gerald was shot. So I was truly at loose ends.

  I kept checking my phone for any signal. Occasionally I got one bar, but no texts from Joaquim or Emily came through. Then it dinged, and I saw I had a voice mail from Emily.

  “Hey,” she said. She sounded like an old woman, weak and worn out. “It’s not there. I’ve been looking through his files, I haven’t slept, I haven’t eaten … it’s just not there. It was the last gift he might’ve had for me, Matt, and now I’ll never get it. He really is gone.”

  The message ended. I tried to call her back, but there wasn’t enough signal for it to go through. I texted her, Hang on. Going to find out tonight. But it wouldn’t go through.

  Frustrated, I went to the kitchen for a drink of either the tooth-rotting sweet tea or something harder, which I couldn’t find. As I stood at the kitchen window, Gerald came out of the barn, toting a bag of feed on his shoulder. It wasn’t his injured shoulder, but his sling was gone, and he moved as if it no longer bothered him. In a world of haints and little-girl mayors, this didn’t seem quite so disconcerting, but it was still weird as fuck. I mean, I’d seen the bullet hole, the blood, the way his face had gone pasty white like old faded linen. And that had been yesterday.

  I watched him carry the feed, knowing what I did about the Tufa, and tried to imagine him naked, with huge wings. He spat on the ground beside the pigs and looked so comfortable in his overalls that for a moment I doubted what I’d seen and experienced. But then, Thorn
was their daughter and Ray was their son, so if I believed it about them, I had to believe they got it from their parents. Which meant that, at that particular moment, I was watching an actual fairy scrape manure from his boots on a fence.

  I wanted to laugh out loud, but I didn’t. Instead I went outside and said, “Can I give you a hand with that?”

  “Naw, it ain’t nothing,” he said. He continued on to the pen, where three small pigs scurried to the ancient trough. The wind changed, and the smell made me scrunch up my face and breathe through my mouth.

  Then Gerald put his head down on his arms atop the nearest fence post. I quickly went to him and said, “Are you all right?”

  He looked up, and I saw tears in his eyes. “This used to be Rayford’s job. Growing up, he was the one who always fed the pigs. He’d slop ’em with table scraps every night after dinner. He wasn’t no shirker, but he purely hated them pigs.”

  I was taken aback by this sudden emotion from a man who’d been so solid and taciturn. All I could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”

  He wiped his eyes, leaving dirty smears on his face. Then he held up his big, meaty hand. “He was my first little baby. I remember when he was born, he was so tiny and red, I was afraid he’d slip right through my fingers. My daddy told me, ‘Ain’t nothing like seeing your own flesh and blood there before you,’ and he was right.” He gestured at the yard. “He used to run around here in his damn diaper, chasing the dogs and the chickens; you couldn’t keep pants on him.” He laughed, then began to sob.

  I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “I loved that boy,” he continued. “I didn’t understand him, but I sure did love him.”

  “He knew you did,” I said.

  “But I didn’t get him. His whole thing with musicals, with wanting to go to New York. Tufa don’t leave, or at least they don’t stay gone. I warned him.”

  I looked everywhere but directly at him.

  He gazed out across the rolling mountains. “I hope he was a good man to y’all Yankees. I hope he didn’t forget what I tried to teach him. Be good to your friends. Listen to their songs. Try to leave things better than you found ’em.”

  Now I was crying, too. “He sure did that, Mr. Parrish. Everyone who knew him loved him because he made us all feel special.”

  He hugged me then, probably the most enveloping, all-encompassing hug I’d ever experienced. His big, solid body shuddered as he cried. I hugged him back as best I could, but felt spindly and spare compared to his masculine strength. I realized this was probably the first time his grief had come out, and he could only show it to me, a stranger whose presence wouldn’t be around to remind him of it later.

  He withdrew, wiped his eyes with one big forearm, and without looking at me said, “Thank you, son. I apologize for that.”

  “No need to,” I said, and dried my own eyes with my shirttail.

  He turned away and started back toward the barn. “Got some stuff to attend to. Tell Ladonna not to hold dinner for me, okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He walked with heavy, defeated steps down the hill to the barn. The scale of what had happened hit me then. I’d never lost a parent, and my brother was still alive; some friends had passed away over the years, but I’d avoided any loss that was so deep, so devastating.

  Then I heard him sing. His voice was eerily similar to Ray’s, but deeper, and raspier.

  Oh, the deacon went down

  To the cellar to pray

  He found a jug

  And he stayed all day.…

  I stayed there by the pen, no jug in hand, listening to the pigs happily chow down and gazing out over the mountains.

  How could a race of fairies exist like this? I mean, every single one of them I’d heard sing or play was an extraordinary musician. Certainly Ray was, and Thorn seemed to have inherited the same talent. Ray had made it big in New York, and if he hadn’t died, he’d have been the toast of the theater scene; so why didn’t any of the others try? Why did they live in poverty, isolated from the world? Why had Gerald said, “Tufa don’t leave”?

  I found Thorn noodling on her guitar on the front porch, a laptop open next to her. I stayed back and watched her for a while. She would try out a chord, change it, and then write it down when it was right. Finally I cleared my throat; she looked up and said, “Hi. Out of sorts without C.C. to drool over?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Have you been crying?”

  “What? No. Just some hay fever, I think. I’m just curious about something. Can I talk to you?”

  “After last night, it’d seem rude to give you the cold shoulder.”

  I ignored the comment. “I wanted to ask you something about the Tufa.”

  “Yes, we like monster truck shows. Nothing like the rumble from an alcohol-burning 575 engine, I tell you what.” She shivered happily, and I wondered whether or not she was kidding.

  “No, not that,” I said, and gestured around me. “It’s … why do you live like this?”

  “In a house?”

  “In a…” I lowered my voice. “In a run-down shack in the middle of nowhere. Like you’re…”

  “Poor white trash?” she finished in an exaggerated Southern accent.

  “Your words, not mine. But yeah.”

  She rested her chin on the edge of the guitar’s body. “How do you think we ended up here? We didn’t start here. We come from a place called Tír na nÓg. Ever heard of it?”

  “No.”

  “No reason you would have. We all lived in a forest, and were watched over and protected by the woodsman. Well, one day he made a bad bet, and somehow our queen found out and wanted to see the outcome. Normally it would have been no problem, but with the queen watching, the woodsman got nervous. He lost the bet, and as a result, the queen banished him. She flung him across the sea, and since he was our leader, we all got flung with him. We traveled west until we ended up here.” She smiled, a kind of sad and tender look I’d never seen on her face before. “You believe that story?”

  “I believe you believe it.”

  She chuckled. “You charmer, you. So yeah, here we were. And then people started showing up. The Native Americans were no trouble, they left us alone and we left them alone, except for friendly relations. But then the Europeans came in, and they fucked up everything. They killed anyone who didn’t look like them, took all the land because they didn’t believe the Indians were actual people, and essentially acted like assholes to a whole continent. Then when they started bringing Africans here as slaves, they noticed that we—the Tufa—looked like we might have some African in us, too. So they tried to include us in their view of the world. Well, we weren’t too happy about that, so we just pulled back into our little hills and hollers. That made us both dangerous and scary to them. And that’s pretty much how they still see us today.”

  “Are you?”

  “What, dangerous and scary? We can be.” She strummed a chord and added, “Does that answer your question?”

  It did, at least for the moment. “What are you working on?”

  “A new song about love.”

  “A love song.”

  “No, that’s different. Want to hear what I’ve got so far?”

  “Sure.”

  She strummed her guitar a couple of times, finding the right chord, then began.

  He was a black-haired boy with a smile like the sun,

  And he knew there was someone for him.

  He was a singer and dancer from a faraway land,

  With no idea how this song would end.

  They looked at each other and the meaning was clear

  Two men with one heart between them

  And when they first touched, all the questions were answered

  Each could see that the other perceived him.…

  When she was done, she looked at me for a reaction. I said, “I bet I know where you got the idea.”

  “I bet you do, too. That last line of the chorus needs
work, though. Maybe ‘believed him’?” She strummed and sang it softly, trying out the new words.

  “If you play that around here, won’t it make things a little awkward for C.C.?”

  “Do you think nobody knows? Here’s a secret: Everyone knows. And nobody cares. It’s not like he’s the only gay Tufa. He’s not even the only gay Tufa on this farm.”

  That took a minute to sink in. “Wait … you?”

  She grinned. “Surprised? Imagine the look on my parents’ face when they find out.”

  “They don’t know?”

  “I haven’t made it official. But they know I don’t date, and I have a couple of girlfriends I’m very close to.”

  “But when you first asked to come with me to New York, you offered…”

  “And I would’ve paid up. That’s how bad I want to get out of here. But that doesn’t change who I am. We don’t buy into your attitudes about sex.”

  “Mine?”

  “Non-Tufa in general. If we like somebody, or something looks like it might be fun, we do it. We don’t worry about labels. And we don’t feel guilty later.”

  “That must be a great way to live.”

  She half shrugged. “It’s not bad.”

  “The outside world isn’t that way. I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

  “You mean you’re not sure I’ll fit in.”

  “That, too,” I admitted.

  “I’m willing to take that chance. I can’t be who I really am here, and it’s got nothing to do with who I like to fuck. I need to see what the world is like.”

  Just then C.C. came around the house, wiping his hands on a rag. He had one smear of grease on his cheek. “So what are you two talking about so seriously?”

  “Music and love, what else is there?” Thorn said.

  “I’m going home to clean up,” C.C. said to me. “I have some calls to make. I’ll be back about sundown. You be ready?”

  I was a little disappointed that he didn’t ask me to come with him. I’d love to help him shower. “Yeah, I’ll be waiting.”

  “Good.” He started to turn away, then stopped. “Remember: if this looks too dangerous, we’ll walk away.”