“Jacob Davis was not just a loving husband and father,” Barnaby said. “He was also a friend, somebody you could count on in hard times. He held to his faith in everything he did, whether he was sitting in the third row of Barkersville Baptist or standing out in the cornfield killing crows.”
Alfred cleared his throat. The widow looked misty-eyed, but the shakes that had plagued her the last couple of days had gone. Her chin was tilted up, as if she were gazing into that better land she would someday share with the love of her life. Sarah and Buck sat on the far end of the row of metal chairs. Buck kept stealing jealous glances toward the backhoe that stood under the apple tree, its metal jaw ready to scoop soil over the coffin as soon as the formalities were done. The backhoe operator, dressed in a pair of blue coveralls, smoked and stared off over the meadows.
An Astroturf rug had been placed over the dirt so everybody’s fine shoes would remain spotless. Roby looked across the brown field at the barn. He caught Marlene looking in the same direction. Their eyes met. Neither of them had any tears.
“Jacob was a man of the earth,” Barnaby continued. “But he was also a man of heaven. As we give him back to the dust from which he was formed, we also deliver him back to God. As we mourn his passing, we also rejoice in his new eternal life. Let us pray.”
Roby’s attention wandered as Barnaby reeled out one of his stock send-offs. The high hills were a splendor of red and yellow, and in the distance the wall of mountains rose like gray skyscrapers. The clouds were thin and far apart. The air smelled of harvest and earthworms. Jacob’s horse, Old Laddie, had come up from the cool banks of the creek and now stood at the fence, watching the proceedings with curiosity.
Alfred and Cindy sat together, holding hands. Harold was at the far end, away from Marlene, his hands clean today. Anna Beth stood near the head of the closed casket, wiping her nose with a shredded wad of tissue. The casket gleamed in the sunshine, suspended by canvas straps over the deep rectangular hole in the ground, a pile of flowers perched on the casket’s slick belly.
Roby read the names on the other tombstones that dotted the stretch of grass. Diane Kelly Ridgehorn, Julia Anne Ridgehorn, Thomas Ridgehorn, Wilbur Derek Ridgehorn, Maude Davis Ridgehorn, others with letters too worn to make out. A dozen dead folks, at least three generations.
Roby wondered who’d baked their pies.
He had no doubt that Johnny Divine had been around for all of them, and that the garage at the end of the world worked just as well by being a train station or a stagecoach stop or a ferry pier. Crossing places, that’s what they were. The mode of transportation didn’t matter, only the route.
And what about the conductors who guided the dead along the way? The people like Roby and Beverly Parsons and Barnaby Clawson? What happened to them? Did they get to take that same road to Judgment that they’d help others find?
Or did they walk a different path?
Roby shook the dread from his thoughts and focused on Barnaby’s prayer. Barnaby had said “Amen,” and the family echoed the hollow word, each in a different rhythm and tone.
“Amen,” Roby said.
“Bye, Jacob,” the widow said. She tensed, and for a moment Roby thought she was going to throw herself onto the casket, the way they did in movies. Then she smiled, rubbed her lips, and turned away. The hearse, oversize and out of place with its polished chrome and tinted windows, blocked her way to the other vehicles. She stumbled over a stone and nearly fell.
Alfred moved over to the widow and put his arm around her, leading her to Marlene’s sedan. Marlene got behind the wheel, and Sarah and Cindy Parsons got in the back seat. Buck and Harold climbed into Buck’s pick-up. Alfred walked back to the grave site as the two vehicles drove off. Barnaby had loaded the flowers into the hearse and was shutting the rear door.
“I’ll put the flowers back when the dirt’s smoothed and the headstone’s placed,” Barnaby told Alfred.
“Funny, ain’t it? Daddy always said he’d rather die than plant flowers where vegetables ought to grow.”
“Your daddy had a way with words.”
“Yeah,” Roby said. “Like those words he said in the barn on your birthday.”
Alfred’s fists clenched. “You promised.”
“What about you? Did you keep your end of the promise?”
“Excuse me, gents, I got to get back to the home,” Barnaby said.
“Hey, why don’t you come on back to the house for a bite first?” Roby said. “There’s plenty enough for everybody.”
Barnaby waved to the backhoe operator, then got in the hearse without a word. He drove away, the vehicle bouncing over the rutted dirt road that led away from the cemetery. The backhoe’s engine roared to life with a giant cough of black smoke and the long metal arm grabbed at the air.
Roby raised his voice over the noise. “Did she eat it?”
Alfred looked down into the hole that would soon be swallowing his daddy. “Yeah.”
“Did you have to trick her?”
“No, I just told her straight up. About you keeping your mouth shut if she did what you wanted.”
“Tell me, and this is important . . . she didn’t get sick or throw up or anything, did she?”
“No. Said it tasted like stale boot leather, though.”
Roby nodded, and they both moved away from the grave as the backhoe approached.
“Come on,” Roby said. “You don’t want to watch.”
“No, I reckon not. Damn, I sure could use a drink.”
“Got a bottle under the truck seat. Keep it on hand for emergencies. Want a ride back to the house?”
Alfred glanced at the casket, then at the distant barn, then in the direction of the Ridgehorn house. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
As they climbed into Roby’s Ford, Alfred said, “So, are you going to tell me what it was I made Marlene eat?”
Roby shifted the Ford into first. “Can’t. It’s a family secret.”
XII.
The kitchen was cleaner now than it had been during the sitting. The counter was almost bare, except for a few slices of store-bought bread in a plastic bag and some shriveled apples piled in glass bowl. The only thing in the sink was Jacob’s denture glass.
“So, are you going to sell the place?” Roby asked the widow.
She had tucked a pinch of cinnamon-brown snuff behind her lower lip and worked it into place before answering. “I reckon not. When you stick your loved ones in the ground, you owe them. We talked it over. The kids will probably sell it off after I’m gone, but that’s their worry. Me, I’m going to leave this world and join Jacob with a peaceful heart.”
“Amen to that,” Roby said.
Marlene came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She stooped from the waist, rummaging on the bottom rack. Roby glanced at the curves of her rear. A door to sin, that’s what it was.
She closed the refrigerator and turned, holding a jar of bread-and-butter pickles. “Say, you know what would go good with this?”
“What?” Roby asked.
“Some of that meat you brought over the other night.”
The widow squinted at him. “What meat? We done took that ham down to the bone.”
“Oh, Roby knows what I’m talking about.”
“You carry your bones with you,” Roby said. “When you cross over. You carry your soured eggs and stale bread crumbs and molded cheese.”
The widow took a step back, her eyes widening. “What in the world’s wrong with you?”
“Peggy Clemens knows. Whole hog. Waste no part of the animal.”
“Alfred!” the widow yelled, her voice brittle off the kitchen enamel.
“And Beverly Parsons. She’s in on it. Barnaby, too.”
Marlene held out the pickle jar as if it were a charm to ward off evil spirits. “You done gone crazy.”
Alfred ran into the kitchen, with Buck and Harold right behind him.
Roby felt the sweat oozing out of the pores of his
face like maggots from the holes of an electrified corpse. “Who’s going to make your pies?” he said. “When you die, who’s going to eat you?”
“Lord have mercy, better call the sheriff,” Harold said. Alfred and Buck closed in on Roby from opposite sides of the counter.
This happened every single time. Roby was wracked by a wave of nausea and nearly collapsed. He grabbed for the edge of the counter and held himself up with effort. The room spun in the corners of his vision, the edges of the world dissolving like sugar in warm water. He felt hands gripping his arms, and he thought of Johnny Divine and the suitcase. Who would carry the suitcase after Roby was gone?
If Roby ever got to go, that was.
He pushed the hands away and straightened, trembling. “Sorry, folks. I just got a little carried away, is all. Been a mighty stressful time for all of us.”
The widow studied him as if he were a bug on glass. “Anna Beth?”
The youngest daughter was standing behind her. “Yeah, Momma? Still want Sarah to call the law?”
The widow peered at Roby. “You been drinking?”
Roby fought off the small lightning bolts that streaked across the gray inside his skull. “Yeah. I apologize. First Jacob died, and then Glenn Isenhour. You know him, don’t you?”
“Distant cousin,” the widow said.
“Well, he was my second cousin. All this dying going on at the same time, I guess I just let it get to me. But I’m fine now.”
“You sure?” Buck said. “You look like you swallowed a live lizard.”
“Yeah. I’ll just get a drink of water and I’ll be good as new.”
He forced himself not to tremble as he walked to the sink. He filled the denture glass from the tap and took four big gulps.
“You better go lay down for a while,” the widow said. “You’re a bit green around the edges.”
“I can make it home,” he said.
“Let me drive you,” Alfred said.
“No. I done put you folks to enough trouble already.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I feel a lot better now. Just needed to get something on my stomach.”
“Well, you be careful driving home,” the widow said. “That’s all we need, is to have to bury another one.”
“I will. And I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I guess we all lost something,” Marlene said. “It’s like all this food everybody brought over. You eat and eat and eat, and you’re still empty inside.”
Roby nodded, not sure what to say. He went outside and sat behind the wheel of his truck for several minutes before driving home.
XIII.
The back room of Clawson’s Funeral Home was as airless as a tomb. Roby didn’t turn on the lights. He knew his way well enough.
Glenn Claude Isenhour’s earthly remains were stretched out on a gurney, his belly as pale as a fish. A long, wet scar ran between his ribs. Barnaby had been at work. He had filled the suitcase. And, tonight, Roby would carry the suitcase to Johnny Divine, who would deliver it to Beverly Parsons.
Roby went outside to wait, leaning against the garage bay where Barnaby kept the hearse parked. He looked at the distant stars, the uncaring and dead moon that hung above him. At least Jacob was up there, rid of his burden, his worries over, his heart at peace. Thanks in part to Roby.
His hand went to his pocket, fidgeted for a moment, then brought out the tough and ragged hunk of meat. He put it in his mouth and chewed, swallowed without gagging, though the taste was bitter.
He was still hungry.
Same as always.
That long-ago night, when he’d made his deal with Johnny Divine, he never realized how empty a person could be.
Oh, he would do it all over again if he had the chance. He didn’t have any regrets. Because when his truck had run off the road, hit a tree and thrown him through the windshield, and he’d lain bleeding to death on the side of the road, Johnny Divine had stepped out of the black nowhere and made the offer.
If Roby had loved anybody besides himself, he might have gone ahead and died and taken his chances. But he’d been scared.
It was a fair deal, all the way around. He helped lost souls find their way to Judgment, and that was something to be proud of. Yet he was always so hollow inside.
Because he’d given Johnny Divine his heart in exchange for his life.
Roby had no relatives to eat his pie. Nobody could help him pass over, nobody could send him down the road to Judgment. Nobody had ever loved him. And he’d never loved anyone else.
All he could do was keep eating his heart himself, and hope someday that he would be full enough, or empty enough, or whatever was required.
But, as always, the leathery thing he’d eaten only left him starved for something deeper, a craving that reached beyond flesh.
He thought of Glen Claude Isenhour lying cold and lost inside the building. Shame burned Roby like an inner fire, and he put away his selfish wishes. The Isenhour family needed him. Maybe in service to others, he’d find what was lacking inside himself. Roby walked under a midnight sky that had never seemed so large, and he straightened his back against the weight of sacrifice, determined to be strong. His own judgment could wait.
Right now, he had a pie to serve and a burial to follow.
THE END
Table of Contents
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A misfit kid is all that stands between a small Blue Ridge Mountain town and its own buried past.
DRUMMER BOY
By Scott Nicholson
©2010 Scott Nicholson
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
The Jangling Hole glared back at Bobby Eldreth like the cold eye of the mountain, sleepy and wary and stone silent in the October smoke.
“Th’ow it.”
Bobby ignored Dex’s taunt as he squeezed the rock and peered into the darkness, imagining the throbbing heartbeat that had drummed its slow rumble across the ages. The air that oozed from the Blue Ridge Mountain cave smelled like mushrooms and salamanders. He could have sworn he heard something back there in the slimy, hidden belly of the world, maybe a whisper or a tinkle or the scraping of claws on granite.
“Th’ow it, doof.”
Bobby glanced back at his heckler, who sat on a sodden stump among the dark green ferns. Dex McCallister had a speech impediment that occasionally cut the “r” out of his words. Dex was so intent on pestering Bobby that he failed to note the defect. Good thing. When Dex made a mistake, everybody paid.
“I hear something,” Bobby said.
“Probably one of them dead Rebels zipping down his pants to take a leak,” Dex shouted. “Do it.”
Vernon Ray Davis, who stood in the hardwood trees behind Dex, said, “They didn’t have zippers back then. Nothing but bone buttons.”
Dex sneered at the skinny kid in the X-Men T-shirt and too-tight, thrift-store jeans that revealed his pale ankles. “What book did you get that out of, V-Ray? You’re starting to sound like Cornwad,” Dex said, using the class nickname for Mr. Corningwald, their eighth-grade history teacher at Titusville Middle School.
Bobby hefted the rock in his hand. Though it was the size of a lopsided baseball, it weighed as much as the planet Krypton. Probably even Superman couldn’t lift it, but Superman wouldn’t be dumb enough to stand in front of a haunted hole in the ground, not while he could be boning Lois Lane or beating up Lex Luthor.
Dex and Vernon Ray were thirty yards down the slope from Bobby, in a clearing safely away from the mouth of the cave. Not that any distance was safe, if what they said was true. The late-afternoon sun coated the canopy of red oak and maple with soft, golden light, yet Bobby shivered, due as much to the chill emanating from the cave as from his fear.
“I’ve been to the camps,” Vernon Ray said. “My daddy’s got all that stuff.”
“That’s just a bunch of guys playing dress-up,” Dex said.
“It’s authentic. 26th North Carolina Troops. Wool pants, bre
ech loaders, wooden canteens—”
“Okay, Cornwad,” Dex said. “So they didn’t have no goddamn zippers.”
“Daddy said—”
“Your daddy goes to those re-enactments to get away from you and your mom,” Dex said. “My old man drags me along, but you always get left behind with the girls. What ya think of that, Cornwad?”
During Dex’s bully act, Bobby took the opportunity to ease a couple of steps away from the mouth of the cave. The noise inside it was steady and persistent, like a prisoner’s desolate scratching of a spoon against a concrete wall. The Hole seemed to be daring him to come closer. Bobby considered dropping the stone and pretending he had thrown it while Dex wasn’t looking. But Dex had a way of knowing things.
“Bobby’s chicken crap,” Vernon Ray said, changing the subject away from his dad and deflecting Dex’s attention. “He won’t throw it.”
Good one, V-Ray. I thought we were on the same side here.
Dex tapped a cigarette from a fresh pack, then pushed it between his lips and let it dangle. “Ah, hell with it,” he said. “You can believe the stories if you want. I got better things to worry about.”
Relieved, Bobby took a step downhill but froze when he heard the whisper.
“Uhr-lee.”
It was the wind. Had to be. The same wind that tumbled a gray pillar of smoke from the end of Dex’s cigarette, that quivered the bony trees, that pushed dead autumn leaves against his sneakers.
Still, his throat felt as if he’d swallowed the rock in his hand. Because the whisper came again, low, personal, and husked with menace.
“Uhrrrr-leeee.”
A resonant echo freighted the name. If Bobby had to imagine the mouth from which the word had issued—and at the moment Bobby was plenty busy not imagining—it would belong to a dirty-faced, gaunt old geezer two hundred years dead. But like Dex said, you could believe the stories if you wanted, which implied a choice. When in doubt, go with the safe bet. Put your money on ignorance.
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 2 Page 53
