by Ninie Hammon
Piper thought to wonder how Riley’d gotten the limp body of his huge little brother out of the woods, but had no chance to ask. The doors leading from the operating room opened, and a doctor in scrubs entered.
“I’m looking for the family of Ezekiel Ray Campbell,” he said.
“That’s us,” Riley said and hurried with Piper across the room. “He’s our little brother. How is he?”
“I believe he will live,” the doctor said, and the breath Piper’d been holding exploded out of her lungs in an inelegant whoosh that almost made her cough. “His injury is not life-threatening.”
The beginnings of a celebratory rumble among the people gathered in the waiting room were cut short by the “but” that followed.
“But the bullet did do substantial damage.”
“What kind of damage?” Piper’s voice was airless.
“To his spinal cord. The bullet entered his back between the fourth and fifth lumbar—”
“Talk English, doc,” Riley barked.
“His spinal cord was severed,” the doctor said. “There really is nothing we can do about it. Your brother is paralyzed from the waist down.”
The communal gasp was so perfectly synchronized, it sounded rehearsed.
“He will need a wheelchair to—”
“Wheelchair?” Riley didn’t bark. He sounded confused, uncomprehending.
“I’m sorry Mr. Campbell.” Then he turned to Piper. “Miss Campbell, your brother will never walk again.”
Piper literally staggered backward like she’d been struck. When she did, she saw the doorway leading to the hallway out of the corner of her eye. Carter was standing there, a look of shock, surprise and horror on his face.
Piper gasped for air like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. She groaned and shook her head in disbelief.
Riley lunged at the doctor, actually grabbed the man by the lapels, and yelled into his face, “Well, you fix it! You hear me, doc? You fix Zeke, you make his legs work—”
Several men in the waiting room grabbed Riley and pulled him off the doctor. When they did, he spotted Carter. With an inarticulate cry of rage, Riley ran toward him, actually growling. Carter didn’t flinch. Riley leaped at him, and the force of his running start knocked Carter backward against the wall, and the two of them fell in a heap in the floor.
The crowd surged that way. A couple of her bigger cousins—Rosco and Ed, Aunt Lucille’s boys, grabbed Riley. Each took an arm and literally lifted him up off Carter. But he was struggling and fighting like a wild man, screaming. “You shot him, I know you done it. You murdering McCulloughs, sneak up and shoot a man in the back.”
Carter staggered to his feet and loosened the tie at his neck, ready for a fight if there was going to be one. But he was not spoiling for one, and when he saw that the others would control Riley, he relaxed the hands that had balled into fists.
“I didn’t shoot anybody,” he said. To Riley, but more to the cooler heads that had prevailed. “I live here in Charleston. I’ve been at work all day. You can check.”
Though there was no love lost between Piper’s cousins and any member of the McCullough clan, everybody knew Carter was a big shot there in Charleston in Northfield Coal. While they might not like that, they were reasonable enough to understand that he was probably the least likely candidate to be the shooter who’d pulled the trigger on a rifle in the mountains earlier in the afternoon.
Piper sealed the deal.
“Marian had a doctor’s appointment here this morning.” Marian, who was dying. “Carter had lunch with us after. I hadn’t been back in the holler half an hour before the sheriff came to tell me about Zeke. There’s no possible way Carter could have had anything to do with it.”
Riley’s eyes still spit fire, but he relaxed and shook off the hands that held him.
“Then I guess that lets you off the hook, don’t it?” he said. He stepped forward and poked Carter in the chest with his finger as he spoke. Carter didn’t flinch.
“But it was a McCullough done it. You know it and I know it. And soon’s I find out which one of you it was, I’m gonna kill him.”
He turned and stormed out of the room. The others wandered off, talking softly among themselves. Piper noticed that the doctor was still standing by the doors where he’d entered, staring in shock at the scene he’d witnessed.
She hurried to him.
“Doctor…?”
“Bledsoe,” he said, his voice a bit shaky. “Dr. Arthur Bledsoe.”
“I’m sorry about Riley, Dr. Bledsoe. He’s…please, tell me about Zeke. Is he awake? Can I see him?”
“No, he’s been deeply sedated and won’t come around until sometime in the morning. He won’t be fully coherent for about twelve hours, actually.” He looked at her sympathetically, perhaps because of Zeke or perhaps because she was obviously the only sane person in a family of lunatics. “You need to go home and get some rest. Come back tomorrow after lunch. He’ll be awake then, and you’ll want to be here with him when I explain his condition.”
Carter walked her to her car in the hospital lot. Neither said anything until he opened the door for her.
“Piper, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He said nothing for a moment, then seemed to recover his voice.
“I’ll be there tomorrow to help in any way I can,” he said. “To stay, until…”
Marian! And Zeke. Piper sagged under the weight of both agonies, and Carter reached out and drew her to him, hugged her tight.
“Take one thing at a time. It’s all you can do. It’s all any of us can do.”
Piper slid in behind the wheel and drove slowly away. She saw Carter standing alone in the parking lot, saw a burst of light as he lit a cigarette—he’d started smoking again after five years! She wondered why.
By the time Piper got home, it was after eleven o’clock, and she’d spent almost five hours on the road. Her head hurt, her back hurt, but mostly, her heart hurt.
Grayson got up from the porch swing where he’d obviously been waiting for her, probably for hours. He said nothing, just gathered her into his arms and held her, patting her back.
Unexpectedly, she started to cry. She could not have identified the specific source of her tears, but found that once she started, she couldn’t stop. She cried for Zeke—eighteen years old and the rest of his life in a wheelchair! And for Marian, saintly Marian, who had only days to live. She cried for Maggie, who would most certainly be returned to her own family soon. For Grayson, poor, lost Grayson. For herself. And for Carter.
Her tears ratcheted up to sobs that racked her whole body. Grayson stood quietly and patted her back. At first, it seemed a comforting, gentle thing to do. But as she continued to cry, his response never changed. And after a while, it felt as repetitious and without feeling as mindlessly patting a dog’s head. It was that, in fact, that sobered her, like cold water splashed in her face. She stopped almost in mid-sob, stepped back out of his arms and looked up into his face.
It was kind. Caring. But he didn’t appear to be the least bit upset. And she wanted upset! She needed upset.
“Zeke’s paralyzed,” she spit at him, angry for no reason. “He’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Eighteen years old, and he’ll never walk again!”
“I’m sorry, Piper.”
Sorry? That’s it?
“Did you hear what I said? My little brother’s been crippled for life.”
“I heard you. That’s terrible.”
But she didn’t think he thought it was terrible at all. She thought she could have told him that Zeke had been eaten alive by a polar bear and all that was left of him was his big toe, and Grayson would have said, “That’s terrible,” in that same maddeningly calm tone of voice.
“What’s wrong with you, Grayson?” She stabbed at his chest the way Riley had stabbed at Carter’s. “You used to have a heart in there. You used to feel things. It used to matter t
o you that people hurt, that they were—” she thought of Marian and involuntarily looked toward her closed bedroom door.
“Dying?” he finished for her.
Her voice caught in her throat, and she couldn’t speak. She just nodded her head as tears welled in her eyes and slid down her cheeks.
“She told me,” he said, in that same dead, flat tone. “Said the doctor gave her a week…maybe less.” His voice cracked when he said it, and tears welled in his own eyes. But his face remained impassive.
She was suddenly pounding her fists on his chest, over the edge into hysteria.
“Say something, Grayson! Anything. Cry, yell, scream, fall on the floor sobbing. Something. Your mother’s going to be dead by this time next week. Don’t you care?”
He grabbed her wrists and held them so tight the grip felt like crushing metal shackles.
“Don’t you think I wish I could just let go?” he hissed with such intensity it felt like he was screaming the words. “Let it all out. I don’t know how anymore. I’ve…seen too much.” He paused, seemed to consider something, then plunged ruthlessly, almost savagely ahead. “Freck, that’s what we called Joey Mattingly, the freckle-faced kid with the pregnant wife.”
She remembered Joey. His wife—his widow—was struggling to raise twin boys alone. Joey’d been killed in the massacre at Fire Station Eagle’s Nest.
“He was in the hole with me, grenades and mortars going off all around us, and he reached over and slapped me hard, right in the face.” He stopped and she felt it coming. “I turned, and the hand and arm that slapped me wasn’t attached to his body.”
She tried to pull away, shook her head, didn’t want to hear any more, but she couldn’t find her voice to tell him to stop.
“And Hawk…Bill Hawkins, he became nothing but red mist when…” Grayson came back from somewhere then, and regained control. He stopped squeezing her wrists but didn’t let her go. “Piper, I’ve seen death and I’ve inflicted it. I’ve seen men shot dead, and I’ve shot men dead. And when that happens, you have to…you can’t…”
He let her go then, turned his back on her and grabbed the porch railing, maybe for support. She knew now was not the time, knew she should keep her mouth shut and go to bed, knew—
“You killed people? Is that what you just said? Shot…? You were a chaplain.”
He turned slowly back to face her, and he’d crawled back into that suit of armor, that impenetrable chain mail that held the man she loved hostage. If, indeed, he was still alive at all.
“I was a soldier,” he said.
And that was it. All she could stand. Too much, in fact. She said nothing but merely stepped back away from him, turned and walked like a zombie into the house, down to the bathroom at the end of the hall, and closed and locked the door behind her.
*
Grayson watched Piper walk away from him and wanted to run after her, to gather her in his arms, to be loving and tender and…
But he stood, rigid, and watched her go.
When a flare lit up the night sky, it was so bright you couldn’t look directly at it, and even when it fizzled and blinked out you could still see it. Your eye had recorded the image and you could see the light even though it wasn’t there.
Their love, their life, their marriage was like that. It had burned so bright its image was seared on his heart. And he could still see it. But it wasn’t really there anymore.
He and Piper weren’t really there anymore.
And he had absolutely no idea how to get back what was gone. If that was even possible. He’d thought so this afternoon in the woods. Things had been so clear there, real, touchable. Now, only shadows again.
He’d intended to have a long talk with Piper, get some things out in the open, start really communicating again. All that had blown up in his face the minute he walked out of the woods and the black box exploded.
Then his mother told him she was dying.
“Doctor said a week, maybe more, maybe less. I’m thinking less,” she said matter-of-factly.
When she saw the stricken look on his face, she’d reached out a bony hand and patted his. “Death lies sleepin’ in us all, a’waitin’ for the rooster to crow. Well, that ole bird’s tunin’ up right now. Remember what your daddy used to say, ‘We all got the same odds—a one-hundred percent chance of dying.’”
And then, more tender.
“You know I’m ready. Me and Jesus is gonna sit down side by side in rockers on a porch somewhere and talk for hours…days. He’s gonna explain all I don’t understand. And I’m gonna look at his face and maybe laugh or sing and dance, or cry. Somethin’ grand, I know that.”
What could he say then? That he didn’t believe there was anything after your last breath but blackness and emptiness?
So he’d offered her the scraps of a smile, patted her hand and swallowed the lump in his throat.
“You got terrible things in your eyes, son.”
“Yeah, I know.
“You wanna tell me about ’em?”
“No.”
“Then tell God about ’em. Not that he don’t already know. It’s not like you pray to give God information he ain’t got. I heard you preach on that once. Remember?”
“I don’t remember any of my sermons, Ma. Not a single one.”
She’d leaned over and squeezed his hand, looked deep into his eyes.
“They’ll come back to you. I promise they will. You wait and see.”
But she wouldn’t be around to find out if they did or not. She’d be dead in a few days.
The pain of that realization hit him fresh as he stood where Piper’d left him on the porch, felt like a bayonet in his side. He sank down into the porch swing, put his face in his hands and tried to cry. He couldn’t. He tried to pray. He couldn’t do that, either.
Chapter 23
Carter knew he looked awful but he didn’t care. He wasn’t trying to impress Stella with his charm or Nelson Warren with his business acumen. They were both going to make the acquaintance of the unvarnished Carter Addington on this sunny Friday morning.
Oh, he’d shaved and put on a clean shirt. But it was what his father’d have called putting lipstick on a pig. He had not slept more than half an hour, and the matched set of dark suitcases under his eyes were prepared to testify to that effect to anybody who looked at him.
Any illusion he might have had about not looking as bad as he felt was quickly dispelled when Stella lifted her head to greet him but didn’t speak, merely stared at him.
“I need to see Mr. Warren,” he said.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but I’ll only take five minutes. It’s important.”
When Carter stood in front of Warren’s desk, he was too tired to make nice.
“I’ll get all my loose ends tied up by the end of the day because I need to take some time off next week,” he said. “Probably all of it. My mother…the doctor told her yesterday she only has a few days to live.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Carter,” Warren said, and he actually sounded like he meant it. Folks in the office said he had a tender side, a human side. They’d seen it when he was with his little boy. But Carter had never seen anything but the steel-plated businessman, shrewd and clever, a man you’d be well advised not to cross. Or trust.
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to leave, but Warren wasn’t finished with him yet.
“She lives up there in Sadler Hollow, right?”
Warren knew perfectly well where Carter’s mother lived.
“Yes, sir.”
“Just down from Impoundment Dam No. 1.”
“Yes, sir—what’s your point?”
“Oh, no point. I’m still curious about the reactions of locals—”
“The locals have more pressing things to think about right now than the dependability of that dam.”
Warren didn’t ask what that might be, merely sat expectantly, waiting for Carter to tell him.
�
��There’s a feud…” His voice trailed off. Where do you start, how do you explain something as tangled up as that?
“A feud?” Warren prompted. He shifted his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, clearly interested in what Carter had to say.
This was not a topic Carter ever wanted to talk about, certainly not now, with Zeke lying in a hospital, unable to move! But he described as succinctly as he could the generations of hostilities between the McCullough family, who’d settled Sadler Hollow, and the Campbell family, who had lived on the slopes of Chicken Gizzard Mountain and down Cricket Hollow on the other side. He explained that it had long since ceased to matter what had struck the original spark. After a while, the embers of hatred were never more than a gust of wind away from bursting into flames and consuming whoever happened to be handy.
“I was twelve the last time there was bloodshed,” Carter said. “My mother’s younger brother, William, and Rooster Campbell, got into a fight.”
“About?”
“Walnuts.”
“Walnuts?”
Carter gritted his teeth.
“The Campbells had a black walnut tree that grew by a creek, and the water washed the nuts downstream.” Carter kept his voice emotionless, like he was reading the ingredients label on a bottle of aspirin. “Whenever my cousin Jesse and his friends were in the woods, they’d fish the nuts out and eat them. One day, Rooster appeared out of nowhere, accused the boys of stealing and took back the two walnuts they hadn’t cracked yet—at gunpoint! Jesse ran home and told his father, who grabbed his gun and went after Rooster. By the end of the day, both men were dead.”
Warren raised his eyebrows at that.
If he says it’s ‘just like the Hatfields and the McCoys,’ I swear I’ll hit him.
He didn’t. But he did seem particularly interested in the latest turn of events in the story.
“And this Riley Campbell who jumped you in the hospital, he’s a…loose cannon?”
