Touched

by Carolyn Haines

  I’d never been one to credit cows with much sense, but this one seemed to know we were trying to help her, and she stood still for the pulling and jerking that finally drained her bag. When I had finished, I was drenched in sweat and my back was throbbing.

  “Mattie, is she better?” JoHanna asked.

  The cow had stopped her bellowing as the tension on her bag eased.

  “She’s better for now, but we’d better find her owner. Must have been a couple of days she’s gone without milking.”

  “Maybe she ran off in the storm.” JoHanna rubbed her between the eyes and earned a lick from a big, sloppy cow tongue.

  “She looks well fed. I don’t think she’d run away and not go home unless the storm got her disoriented.” The cow was on a slight rise in the pasture, which gave a better view. I looked toward where the road led. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like a cluster of oaks that might be a homestead. “Maybe she lives there.” I patted her hip. “Let’s go see.”

  “Then we have to go back for John. I don’t like the idea of him standing on the road alone, waiting for us.” She didn’t have to say more. If Doc hadn’t been able to calm the town, they might take their anger out on a stranger. Especially if they had any idea he was linked to us.

  “We can turn around at those trees. If she isn’t theirs, maybe they’ll take care of her.”

  JoHanna took her long strides to the car and had it cranked before I could get in the passenger seat.

  Duncan had sat back in the seat, but she wasn’t any more relaxed as we turned beneath a canopy of oaks to find a small farmhouse. Several chickens clucked up to us, but they backed away when Pecos leaped out of the backseat and ran at them.

  “Pecos!” Duncan shouted, going after the bird for all she was worth. Her legs were slow, but she was determined to capture the rooster before someone came out the door and shot him.

  JoHanna and Duncan were busy with that damned rooster, but I had time to look at the house. It stood square and solid, gingham curtains in the front windows. No one came to a window or door. No one was coming out. There was a stillness about the place that made me swallow. JoHanna, too, finally sensed something. She glanced at me.

  There was a general air of neatness about the place, but the storm had blown down limbs that were untouched. One of the front windows had blown out, and there was no sign of anyone trying to clean up the mess. JoHanna got out of the car and started toward the front door. In contrast to her normal stride, she walked slowly, cautiously, and I hurried to catch up with her.

  At the door she knocked, but the sound echoed hollowly. There was no one home. The house had that silence of emptiness, as if it had been abandoned for a long, long time. As if the occupants had fallen under some spell of enchantment.

  “Maybe they went out of town and couldn’t get back because of the storm. Maybe we should leave them a note saying we milked their cow but they need to see to her.” I spoke into the vacuum that cloaked the house. My words seemed to disappear into the old boards, swallowed whole.

  “Mama?” Duncan’s voice was peculiar.

  “What?” JoHanna went to the window that had been destroyed and peered inside.

  “Mama?” Duncan’s voice was more demanding.

  “What?” JoHanna’s answer was short, and she turned to face her child with a frown on her face. The expression on Duncan’s face froze her, and she followed the way that Duncan’s finger pointed until she saw them.

  We saw them.

  Almost at the same instant.

  Hanging from the limbs of the oak tree at the back of the house were five bodies. Three children, one a very young girl, and a man and a woman.

  JoHanna reeled on the porch, stumbling into me. We managed to catch each other as we backed down the steps and to the car. Pecos chose that moment to make a run at the chickens, and they scattered beneath the hanging corpses.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said, my breath sounding like the rattle of cornhusks on the wind. “Sweet merciful Jesus.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the little girl. She wasn’t more than three, her nightgown hanging past her feet.

  JoHanna breathed through her mouth. “What happened?”

  Standing by the passenger door of the car, Duncan stared at the bodies. “He killed the wife and then the children. He held them in the ditch in front of the house and drowned them in the middle of the storm. And then he killed himself.”

  “Duncan!” JoHanna broke the horror of the scene by running around the car to her daughter and gathering her up in her arms. But Duncan pushed her mother away. “The dream was so confusing. I saw the bodies in the trees, but I couldn’t see the ropes. I knew they’d drowned, but it wasn’t clear why they were in the trees. I thought it was the dreams of people afraid of drowning. Now I know. Now I see what happened.” She looked up at her mother, fear tracing diamonds in her eyes. “It was exactly as I dreamed it.”

  Thirty-one

  IN our rush to leave, we almost forgot Pecos, but Duncan realized our mistake and JoHanna backed up so that I could leap out of the car and catch the rooster. To my horror, Pecos refused to come to me. He feinted and wove, determined not to be captured when there were hens to impress. When I cornered him by the fence, he ran under the oak tree where the corpses hung. He took his stand beneath those dangling legs and dared me to come after him.

  “Pecos!” I hissed at him. At that moment I would have gladly wrung his neck. He made a foray out toward a hen, and at last I caught him by his tail feathers and stalled him long enough to get my fingers around his scrawny throat. He pecked me once on the cheek, ripping an angle of skin free so that it flapped, but I held him tight and handed him off to Duncan in the backseat. JoHanna set the car in motion before I could sit down and close the door. Without slowing her pace, JoHanna gave me a clean handkerchief to staunch the flow of blood from my cheek, and Duncan gave me an apology for the rooster, who showed no remorse.

  Tree limbs tore at the side of the car as we raced over the rutted road, but JoHanna did not slow. Her eyes were wild and her knuckles white as she gripped the wheel and pushed the car to dangerous speeds. When we came to the main road, JoHanna burst onto it without letting up. The car slued in the gravel and then righted itself as we sped toward Jexville. In the horror of what we’d seen, Jexville seemed a lesser evil.

  “Mama, we can’t just run off and leave them hanging in the trees like that.”

  Duncan’s calm voice made JoHanna slam on the brakes so hard that Pecos was thrown into the back of the front seat.

  “Mama! Dammit!” Duncan kicked the seat and then gathered Pecos in her arms. She refused to say another word until she’d examined the rooster and had him perched beside her again.

  “Duncan McVay!” JoHanna’s voice cracked with fear and command. “What we saw back there is forgotten. Your dream is forgotten. None of this will ever be spoken of again.”

  Duncan busied herself stroking Pecos’s feathers, her face averted. I saw the big tears splash on her pants, the moisture immediately soaked up by the brown material.

  “Duncan, do you hear me?”

  She nodded, creating another cascade of tears.

  I knelt in the front seat and reached back to her, lifting her face so that JoHanna could see her tears.

  “Oh, Duncan.” JoHanna turned off the car and climbed into the backseat herself. She caught Duncan to her and held her, lifting her face to kiss her. “I’m sorry, Duncan. I didn’t mean to yell at you like that. It’s just that those people are dead, and I don’t want us to be blamed for any part of that. We’ve got enough trouble in town without five dead people.”

  JoHanna was right about that. Just sitting in the middle of the road made me nervous. The sheriff or anyone else could be waiting for us off in the trees. I scooted over behind the wheel and set the car in motion. John Doggett would be waiting for us. He’d know best what to do about the dead folks on that narrow, rutted road. I couldn’t shake the image of them, hanging like so many deer and
hogs, strung up for butcher. What in the world had happened at that neat little farm? Had the man really murdered his family, as Duncan said? Or had some other person, some passerby, stopped to take advantage of a family isolated by a raging hurricane?

  The day was hotter than six degrees of hell, but cold sweat trickled down my ribs and in the bends of my knees. I eased the car along, praying that I could remember how Jojo had showed me to shift gears. He’d taught me to drive so I could get his liquor for him when he didn’t want to get out of the house.

  Jojo wasn’t the kind of teacher who had a lot of patience with scraping gears and faulty starts, so I drove fairly smoothly, but it had been a long time since I’d tried. The car lurched forward twice, then leveled out. As we drew close to town, I turned left onto the back road. Through the glare on the windshield, I saw the tall, lean form of John Doggett waiting on the side of the road.

  By the time he climbed into the car beside me, JoHanna, Duncan, and the rooster had settled down a bit, but we were all still white-faced and shaky. I pressed hard on the gas until John touched my hand on the steering wheel. “Ease off, Mattie,” he said, looking behind us to make sure we weren’t being chased. He patted the sack he carried. “The milk won’t spoil in another ten minutes.” His words were light, his touch casual, but there was tension in the way he looked behind us every few minutes. As if he expected someone to round the last curve, following.

  JoHanna held Duncan in her lap, curled against her more like a child than I’d seen her since the lightning strike. “Did you see Floyd?”

  John hesitated. “I couldn’t find him, but I couldn’t find Mr. Moses either.”

  “Did you ask his wife?”

  “She said they’d gone to get some boards to put over the broken window, but she’d expected them back at lunch today. They took the mule and wagon out to the sawmill, she said. I went over there, but they weren’t hanging around. No sign of the mule and wagon either. Maybe they had to go somewhere else.”

  His words left a strange uneasiness. “Had they been to Leather-wood’s?” I asked.

  “Nobody would say.” John wiped his forehead on his sleeve. He was hot and dirty and tired. “It could be they didn’t want to talk to a stranger. The storm has left a lot of folks spooked.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  As I cast a quick glance in the backseat, JoHanna kissed Duncan’s forehead, shielding her against her breasts. It looked like Duncan may have gone to sleep. Or drifted back into that still silence that frightened all of us.

  JoHanna spoke again, softly. “Mattie, you tell John what we found.”

  I gave him the whole story, about how we went down the road because of Duncan’s dream, killing time while we waited to pick him up. Just as I got to the part about the bodies hanging in the trees, I pulled into the McVays’ yard. I turned off the motor and told him about the bodies. Parked in the shade of the chinaberry tree, we all sat in the car for a while without talking. It was Pecos who broke the spell, flapping out of the car as if he’d had enough of human foolishness, to sit in a hot car without going anywhere.

  John reached over and touched my cheek where Pecos had drawn blood. “I swear, Mattie, you look like you’ve been attacked by wild Indians.”

  I burst into tears, which provoked a round of sobs from JoHanna and Duncan. John, the handkerchief in his hand where he’d intended to wipe the blood from my face, looked from one of us to the other.

  “What are we going to do?” JoHanna took a ragged breath. “John, those children have to be cut down. We can’t risk going back through town.”

  “You’re right about that.” He got out of the car and leaned into the back to pull Duncan out of JoHanna’s arms and into his. She clutched his neck and pressed her face into his shirt, now damp and sweat-covered from the hot, hot sun.

  “We can’t leave them …” JoHanna put her hand on the back of the front seat to get out.

  “We can and we are.” John spoke sharply as he started in the house with Duncan.

  JoHanna nudged me to get out, and she followed as we all walked toward the house, Pecos at our heels. I noticed several of his longest tail feathers were missing.

  “John, something has to be done….”

  “We have to stay away from there,” I said. “There’s nothing we can do for dead folks.” To reveal our knowledge of the deaths would be to open the door to trouble. Not a single person in that town would believe we happened down that red twisty road. If the sheriff and his henchmen ever found out JoHanna and Duncan had been at that little farm, there would be hell to pay. The bad feelings in Jexville would boil over, and Duncan would be the one to get scalded. There was nothing we could do for that family now. They were dead. And if we didn’t want trouble, we’d have to keep quiet and keep our distance.

  John walked straight through the kitchen and took Duncan to her room. He eased her down in the bed and brushed away the tears that clung to her eyelashes as JoHanna stood at the bed and I hovered two feet back. Duncan was too pale, her eyes too large and black.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Duncan nodded.

  “Can you talk?” I asked, afraid she’d gone back into her mute state again.

  She nodded.

  “Then talk. Say something.”

  “Are those people dead because of me?” She asked the question of JoHanna.

  JoHanna sat on the bed. “They’re dead because someone did something horrible. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “People will think that I did. Mattie’s right. If we tell about being there, people will think that we killed them.”

  “It doesn’t matter what people think, Duncan. You know the truth.” JoHanna smoothed Duncan’s fine, dark hair, concentrating on her daughter.

  I caught John’s signal and started to ease out of the room, but JoHanna reached out and caught my pants. Her fingers closed over the shape of the gun and I saw the surprise in her eyes, but she hid it from Duncan. “I want all of us to hear this. Back there at that farm, I got scared and I ran. In doing that, I acted like we’d done something wrong. But we hadn’t. We didn’t do anything wrong.” She ruffled Duncan’s hair in a continuous motion. “Someone killed that family. I don’t know who would do such a thing, but it was someone either really sick or really mean. It was our misfortune that we found what they’d done.”

  “Are we going to leave them?” Duncan’s bottom lip trembled. “That little girl …”

  John leaned down. “Duncan, they’re dead. We can’t do anything to help them.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Someone will find them and take care of it. We have to stay clear of this. We didn’t do anything wrong, but the people in town may not see it that way. They’re already afraid.”

  “Of me.”

  “Of you,” he conceded. “They think I’m evil.”

  “They think a lot of things. That doesn’t make it right, but it does make them dangerous.” John put his hands on JoHanna’s shoulders, but he spoke to Duncan. “In your dream, did you see the man drowning all of them?”

  Duncan’s eyes grew vague as she concentrated. “I saw them lying in the field beside the house, side by side, the woman and then the children, the two boys beside the mother and the little girl last.”

  “And the man, what was he doing?”

  “He was on his knees by the ditch where the water was running fast, and the rain was coming down. I thought he was praying.” She closed her eyes. “But he had drowned them.”

  “Are you sure?” John asked.

  “What difference does it make?” JoHanna said. “They’re dead. He’s dead.”

  John straightened up and looked at me. “Because if he didn’t kill them, someone else did. And that someone may still be on the loose around here. That’s the difference.”

  “What should we do?” JoHanna asked. The thought of that entire family hanging there was eating away at her. They were dead, certainly, and hanging there couldn’t matter
to them. But it was another violation to leave them there to swing in the sun like some awful fruit, slowly ripening. The right thing to do would be to notify Sheriff Grissham and let him cut them down. But calling the sheriff put JoHanna square in the middle of some questions that had no reasonable answers.

  “Let it go.” John signaled me again with his eyes as he left the room.

  I met him in the kitchen. He was standing at the sink staring out the window at the chinaberry tree. The yard was covered with leaves blown down by the storm.

  “Things are bad in town,” he said. “There’s lots of talk. After you drove away, they wanted to come out here and burn the house down.”

  “Why didn’t they?”

  “Doc Westfall shamed them. Some of the men are truly afraid, Mattie. Someone’s got them so worked up they believe JoHanna and Duncan can can kill people with a look. Those are the ones Doc shamed. But the ones behind all this … They know better, and they’re doing this deliberately.” He didn’t look at me.

  “You think it’s Elikah, don’t you?” My stomach had grown tight, hot.

  “Maybe. He stayed in his barbershop, made certain he wasn’t part of any crowd. It doesn’t make any sense.” His hands flexed on the lip of the sink, gripping, then relaxing. “That’s what frightens me. It doesn’t make a bit of sense, but they’re acting like it does.”

  “Are they going to hurt us?”

  His hands tightened on the porcelain, a pulse of frustration. “I want you to help me convince JoHanna to leave tonight. She can get to New Augusta or Hattiesburg. I’ll go to Mobile and wait for Will to come in on the train.”

  “Why can’t we go to Mobile?” It didn’t make sense for us to go in the opposite direction from Will.

  “There was storm damage. I’m not certain how bad, but it may not be safe for you. The roads north will be clearer. Besides, it’s hot. There’s always sickness after a storm like this.”

  “Yellow jack.” I’d heard the stories of epidemics. Those were wartime epidemics. They didn’t happen now, did they?