He wished he could recall the bullet to the gun, wished that someone besides himself had seen Ma sitting there by the fire with a cup full of poison and her mind set on murder.
His thoughts jumped from the sight of her by the fire to the sight of Silas falling in the road. If Molly hadn’t jumped, would I have still pulled the trigger? He couldn’t ignore the feelings of jealousy he’d had watching Peyton waltz Isabel around the dance floor. Had that clouded his thinking?
He put his face in his hands and slid into the swamp of that thought. It didn’t matter if his crime was cold-blooded murder or just plain bad luck. Either way, Silas was dead.
Ephraim crossed his arms over his stomach as if compressing an actual cramp. He rocked forward and backward. The more he thought about it, the more comforting the thought of the noose became. He ran a hand across his neck, imagining rough fibers squeezing a raw circle into it—a short, tight end to this torment. That’s the best thing for it. I deserve to die.
Outside, the men dispersed, and Ephraim heard the jangle of keys as the guard changed.
“You sure you want to take another watch already, Jubal? You were here all last night,” Manson said.
“Ain’t no problem,” Jubal said. “It’ll all be over soon enough. Besides, I figure them with wives and children will want to go home and tell ’em ’bout what’ll be happenin’ tomorrow mornin’.”
Ephraim stayed where he sat, listening to the keys clank softly as Jubal shifted in the chair outside. After a minute, all Ephraim could hear was the thudding of his own heart. He wondered: why was it racing? He hadn’t exerted himself for hours now. Maybe it knew it didn’t have much longer to pulse beneath his ribs and was trying to expend a lifetime’s worth of beats before the sun came up tomorrow. He imagined himself being led to the gallows, an old man before his time.
Justice would be served at dawn, and rightfully so. He’d killed an innocent man, plain and simple.
He turned his gaze to the rafters. Why wait?
He stood and walked to the middle of the room. The ceiling in the jail was low and Ephraim put his hand over the rafter from where he stood. He could make amends for his crime right here, right now.
He unbuttoned his brown wool shirt and looped it over the rafter so that the sleeves dangled down on either side. He tied the sleeves together and tugged on them. There wasn’t anything in the room to stand on, and even if there was, the ceiling was too low for it to do any good. He’d have to twist the makeshift noose around his neck and try to sit to make it work.
He stuck his head through the sleeves and spun around several times so they crossed behind his neck. At first, a hollow ache filled his chest; he’d only made it to sixteen years old. But then an odd calm came over him. This made sense: a life for a life. Nothing he could ever say or do would bring Silas back or ease Peyton’s loss. This was the only way.
He bowed his head and stepped forward, feeling the noose tighten around his throat.
The bump of boots sounded on the wooden porch outside. Ephraim lifted his head.
“Good evening, Jubal.” It sounded like Reverend Boggs.
“Evenin’, Reverend.”
Something heavy hit the porch boards with a thunk.
“I brought you a supper pail,” the reverend said. “There’s fresh side pork, hot biscuits, and a jug of coffee in there.”
“Why thank you, Reverend,” Jubal said. “I was gettin' mighty hungry.”
“No thanks necessary,” Boggs said. He chuckled. “Us bachelors have to look out for each other. A man without a wife often goes too long between hot meals.”
“Mmm,” Jubal replied, his voice thickened by a mouthful of food. He smacked and swallowed. “It’s a cryin’ shame. One of these days, I’ll find me a woman.”
“As you should,” Boggs said. “Say, I was wondering if I might ask a favor of you. Being the preacher of this town, I figured I should talk with Ephraim before the execution. Can you let me in?”
Ephraim stepped back. He didn’t want the reverend to catch him in the act of dying. He’d envisioned this as a private moment.
“It’d only be right,” Jubal agreed through another mouthful. The chair creaked, and the keys jangled as they changed hands. “The middle key opens the lock.”
“Thank you.”
The hasp of the lock scraped, and the door swung open. Reverend Boggs peered in, squinting in the gloom. When his gaze landed on Ephraim, his eyes widened. He stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind him. “Heavens, Ephraim!” he said in a low whisper. “What’re you doing?”
Ephraim turned his face to the wall, eyes burning with guilt. “Figured I’d save the Hensons the trouble.”
“This is some good coffee, Reverend!” Jubal called from the porch. Ephraim heard him take a slurp and sigh.
“Get that thing off your neck,” Boggs said. “I’m here to collect you.”
“What?” Ephraim looked up at Boggs’s face.
The reverend gave a curt nod, and his eyes flicked to the door. “I’m going to take you with me, and we’d best be going now while the road is still empty.”
“No, Reverend. This is what I deserve.”
Boggs folded his arms. “Come now. Any fool can die for his sins. It takes something more than a coward to live with them.”
“I killed Silas,” Ephraim said. “This is justice.”
“Think of your mother, boy.”
Ephraim looked up. “She’s the one that wanted me to do it. Besides, what good am I to her now? I can’t stay in Sixmile Creek.”
“I agree. You must leave this town. But you won’t be good to anyone, least of all your mother, if you aren’t living.”
The reverend reached into his coat and produced a tomahawk with a dull iron blade. Ephraim was surprised; he’d never known that the preacher carried a weapon.
Boggs opened the door a crack and peered out, then beckoned to Ephraim. “Come on, we don’t have much time.”
The reverend’s matter-of-fact tone had weakened Ephraim’s resolve to take his own life. He turned around until the noose loosened, then he pulled his head out and retrieved his shirt. The sleeves were stretched out, but he put it back on and followed Boggs onto the porch.
Jubal sat sprawled in his chair, his head tilted backward. The overturned jug sat cradled in his lap, a drip hanging from its neck. Spilled coffee pooled around his boots, draining through the porch boards.
“What’s the matter with him?” Ephraim asked.
“I drugged the coffee. It’ll take him a few hours to sleep it off. Come on now, we need to leave.”
“No one knows you’re lettin’ me out?”
“Not a soul. I heard you were going to be hanged at dawn. As your preacher and friend, I can’t abide the thought. Let’s go.” The reverend laid a hand on Ephraim’s shoulder and steered him past the unconscious guard.
As they departed, Boggs laid the keys in Jubal’s lap, retrieved the coffee jug and bucket, and refastened the padlock on the door. “Quickly now. Let’s get you back to my place. You’ll have to stay in the cellar for a few days until we can get you away from Sixmile Creek.”
Ephraim paused in the road. “Wait a minute. When Jubal wakes up, won’t he realize it was you that let me out?”
Reverend Boggs continued walking. “He might, but he won’t speak of it after I tell everyone he was sleeping on the job when I left the jail.”
“You think folks will believe you?”
Boggs smiled. “There are advantages to being the only preacher in town.”
Ephraim and Reverend Boggs took a route through the woods, emerging between the reverend’s garden and the church graveyard. Boggs swept Ephraim inside his home and barred the door behind them, then removed his hat and hung it on a peg by the door.
“Let’s get you something to eat, son. Then we’ll talk.”
“I ain’t hungry,” Ephraim said.
Boggs cut a few slices of side pork and a wedge from a round of cornbread.
He served them, along with a tin cup of spring water, to Ephraim at his bare wooden table, and sat down across from him. “Even a man sentenced to hang gets a last meal. Eat.”
Ephraim picked up the cornbread and took a bite.
“So tell me what happened.” Boggs’s somber gray eyes locked onto Ephraim’s.
The lump of cornbread in Ephraim’s mouth felt dry. He swallowed, and it scraped painfully downward. “Ma wanted me to shoot Silas. She told me I had to, or she’d kill herself.”
Boggs nodded heavily. “I figured it was something like that. I’m certain no one knows your mother and understands your situation like I do.”
Ephraim slid forward in his chair. “You knew she wanted me to kill Silas?”
Boggs shook his head. “No. In my visits, she expressed her anger over your father’s death, but she never said anything about killing Silas.”
“Oh.” Ephraim looked down at his plate. “I never even knew she was angry. She held Pa’s gun a lot, but she never said anythin’ ’bout gettin' revenge until last night.” He teased the pork around the plate with a fork. “She was so set on it. She’s never demanded somethin’ like that out of me. You should’ve seen her—she had this cup full of foxglove tea and said she was goin’ to drink it if I wouldn’t shoot Silas. I tried to take it away from her, and she said she’d just make it again, and drink it when I wasn’t home. There wasn’t no talkin’ her out of it.”
Boggs sat back and folded his arms. “I hear you, son. There was little I could do for a soul so anguished.”
Ephraim nodded. He pushed the plate aside and clasped his hands together on top of the table. “But, I’m the one that pulled the trigger, Reverend. I’m a murderer now, ain’t I? Does that mean I’m goin’ to Hell?”
Boggs raised his eyebrows. “Well, Ephraim, that’s a good question. I can see why you’d ask that.” He leaned forward. “There are many ways to damn yourself in this life, but there’s also more than one path to redemption.”
“So you think there’s a way for me to make things right?”
The reverend thumbed his ear. “I didn’t say that. Silas is dead, Ephraim. That can’t be undone.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“All I’m saying is, sometimes you just have to find a new way to approach the issue. A back door, so to speak.”
“Heaven’s got a back door? That don’t sound right.”
Boggs frowned. “Do you remember the story of Jonah?”
Ephraim nodded.
“Do you think right after he was swallowed by the whale, that he believed he could make it out alive?”
“No, I don’t suppose he did.”
Boggs nodded. “That’s right. But eventually he decided to barter his way out, didn’t he? He told the Lord he would go prophesy in Nineveh. And the fish,” Boggs opened his mouth wide and brought his hand to his mouth with spread fingers, “spewed him out.” He leaned back in his chair. “Jonah found a way to escape the inescapable.”
Ephraim furrowed his brow and stared at the ceiling. “So maybe I can make a deal with God.”
Boggs pushed his chair back from the table and stood. “Perhaps. The point I was trying to make is that Jonah didn’t give up. He got what he wanted, but there was a price. Everything has a price.” He stretched and yawned. “Let’s continue this discussion some other time. It’s late, and I have a sermon to prepare tomorrow.”
Boggs walked to his bed, picked up a folded blanket and quilt, and handed them to Ephraim. “It may not seem hospitable, but I think you’d best sleep in the root cellar. Once people realize you’re missing, they’ll be searching everywhere.” He opened a hatch in the floor immediately in front of the hearth. A ladder provided access to the rock-lined hole.
Ephraim climbed down and arranged the blanket and quilt on the floor.
“All settled?” Boggs asked.
Ephraim nodded. He suddenly remembered the stranger he’d seen the night of the dance. The man had asked about Reverend Boggs. Ephraim looked up. “Did that man passin’ through town find you?”
Boggs looked confused. “What man?”
“I saw him two nights ago before I killed Silas. He asked about you and someone named Amos.” Ephraim stopped. “Come to think of it, he saw me shoot Silas too.”
Boggs scratched his jaw. “I can’t think of who it would be. What did he look like?”
“He was dirty, smelled real bad.”
Boggs shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Sounds strange.”
“He was.”
“Well, we’d best get some sleep,” the reverend said. “Goodnight, Ephraim.” And he shut the hatch, leaving Ephraim in hollow darkness.
11
The Snake and the Shovel
A dim awareness crept over Jubal. He was being dragged by his ankles. His body cut a furrow through the dry leaves of the forest floor like a plow behind an ox. His mouth felt dry—it reeked of coffee and something else. His stomach curdled at the taste.
Through the trees, he could make out a light shining from the back window of Coleman’s Dry Goods store. The light was growing more distant.
Jubal tried to remember leaving his post at the jail, but couldn’t. Maybe he’d had a jug of the Fletchers’ moonshine? Jubal blinked. He couldn’t remember doing that either.
A branch snagged the cuff of one of his sleeves. Whoever had him kept pulling. The dead wood bent and broke with a snap that sounded like a gunshot in the stillness of the night.
A rock beneath the litter scraped up his back. Jubal tried to lift his head, but a hazy weakness saturated his entire body, and the back of his skull jolted over the rock. He moaned deep in his throat.
The memory of a black rat snake he’d found in his chicken coop swam through the fog of his mind. Nearly five feet long, the serpent had gorged itself on an entire clutch of eggs. When Jubal discovered it, the end of one white orb still protruded from its unhinged jaws. He’d seized the snake by the tail and dragged it into the yard like a limp string of sausages. Bulging and too sluggish to resist, the reptile had watched through dull eyes as he’d fetched an ax and cut off its head.
Jubal felt like that snake right now.
Without being able to raise his head, he could only catch occasional glimpses of the figure pulling him. He could see one hand clutching the rope lashed between his ankles, the other hand using a shovel like a cane. Where was this stranger taking him?
He breathed in sharply, summoning as much strength as he could, and tried to kick free. His legs flopped like dead catfish. Jubal cursed himself for being so weak.
The shovel-wielding figure stopped abruptly, dropped Jubal’s feet and studied the ground. In the darkness, Jubal could just make out the lines of a man’s face shadowed by the brim of a hat. The man stuck the tip of his shovel into the dirt, put his heel on it, and drove the blade into the earth. He dug hastily, hacking at tree roots with the side of the shovel. The metal clanged dully with each impact.
After what seemed like an eternity, the man stopped digging. He stood with one foot on the shovel, leaning forward, looking at Jubal’s prostrate form as if gauging its size. He climbed out of the hole, lifted the shovel in both hands and walked to where Jubal lay.
Jubal made the only sound he could: a pitiful, doglike whine. He tried to move again but succeeded only in shrugging his shoulders.
The man placed the back of the shovel blade on Jubal’s face. The cold metal pressed against his lips, and he tasted dirt on the end of his tongue. Questions swarmed through Jubal’s thoughts. Who? Why?
When the man raised the shovel above Jubal’s head as if to strike, Jubal found, in his desperation, the strength to move. He rolled onto his stomach and thrashed in the leaves, trying to wriggle away. He wouldn’t die like this, not here in the woods, as helpless as that stupid rat snake!
The man stomped on Jubal’s back, driving the air from his lungs. Jubal stopped moving, stunned. The man slid his foot under Jubal’s belly and turned him over.
Jubal got one last glimpse of the stranger’s shadowed face before the shovel swung down in a single swift motion.
12
Wanted and Unwanted
Isabel awoke to the sound of raised voices. She tumbled out of bed and ran downstairs to the dry-goods store, not bothering to change out of her nightgown.
“Now hold on a minute,” her father was saying. “Let me light a lantern so we can see each other.”
Isabel heard him strike a match. An oil lamp flared to life, illuminating the faces of Manson, Franz, Ernest, Hebe Washburne, and a dozen other men.
“You say he’s escaped from the jail?” Isabel’s father asked.
“That’s what it looks like,” the blacksmith answered. “Ralph went down there to take over guard duty at midnight. Jubal wasn’t there. The jail was locked and empty.”
Isabel’s pulse quickened. Ephraim had escaped.
“You think Jubal let him out?” her father asked.
“I can’t figure why he’d do a thing like that, but I reckon there ain’t no other reason they’d both be missin’,” Manson said. “Besides, there ain’t no signs of a jailbreak.”
A horse snorted in the road outside, and Isabel’s father looked out the window. “The Hensons are here,” he said.
Peyton’s voice came from outside. “Manson, you got Cutler up there?”
Manson stepped out onto the porch. The other men filed out behind him, and Isabel hurried to the window. Peyton was sitting astride his horse outside, and behind him, in a cabriolet, sat a well-dressed couple, their stony faces lit by a lantern.
“No, Peyton, we don’t,” Manson said. “I’ll be straight with you: we just went down to the jail, and both Ephraim and Jubal are gone.”
Peyton glanced at the couple, then back to Manson. “When do you reckon this happened?”
“Sometime between when I left Jubal and midnight.”
In hushed tones, Peyton conferred with the man in the cabriolet. After a few moments, the man smoothed his mustache and rose from his seat.
Some Dark Holler Page 8
