When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  So many places in his mind he didn’t want to go! Every day, new black box landmines. His own wife actually believed he shot her little brother! How crazy was that? No crazier than the red mud on his boots when he’d have sworn on all he held sacred he hadn’t been anywhere near Blood Creek.

  And “his own wife” might not be that for very long.

  “I’m done! That’s it. We’re through! I want you out of my life and Sadie’s life. It’s over between us, Grayson.”

  Only it wasn’t. Piper’s understandable hysterics aside, she was his still, for the time being. That was clear this morning as soon as she began to scream. And she would remain his wife as soon as he could convince her—

  A sound. He stopped, listened. Far away. He couldn’t tell from where.

  “Suuunny! Where are you, honey?”

  His heart sank. Carter hadn’t found them either! Where could two little girls possibly have gone all by themselves?

  “Suuunny, come to Unka Car—”

  The cry cut off abruptly in midword. Something had interrupted him. Maybe Carter found them! And maybe that wasn’t what it was at all. Grayson began moving again silently through the trees in the direction he thought the cry had come—Hickman’s Thumb.

  ***

  Carter hadn’t been gone from the house for an hour before his throat was raw and his voice gravely from calling Sunshine’s name. But he knew his brother’d been right—even if Maggie tried to hide from the searchers, she’d never be able to shut Sadie up once the toddler heard Unka Cardur calling her.

  The image of her face, giggling and crying out, “Again, again!” brought an entirely different kind of ache to his throat. If anything happened to that precious little girl…

  Like maybe losing her father, you mean? Like watching her father get hauled off to prison for a crime he didn’t commit?

  Carter shook his head wearily. He had been listening to that voice and all the other voices inside him try to shout each other down all night as he lay on the lumpy couch trying not to hear Piper sobbing into her pillow on the floor in his dying mother’s bedroom.

  What had he done? And how could he possibly undo it?

  He didn’t know much, but the answer to question number two was pretty clear. He couldn’t!

  “Suuunny!” he called, picking his way across the slanted hillside. He could see Hickman’s Thumb in a flat space up ahead. How had Maggie carried a toddler through these woods? And her feet were cut! Okay, not seriously. But she was a little kid—weren’t little kids supposed to be wimps? “Where are you, Suuunny?”

  Nope, much as Carter’d like a do-over, the eggs were scrambled. Carter, Jesse, and Buster went to prison. Or Grayson did. For something that wasn’t his fault.

  Wasn’t his fault…

  A sudden realization lit up his mind like a lighthouse beam on a reef. Maybe Grayson wouldn’t go to prison after all! He’d been in some kind of blackout or flashback or whatever they called it, hadn’t he? He wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t his fault!

  Yes!

  Grayson’s chilled soul warmed to the idea like hot breath on frostbitten fingers.

  A good lawyer could make hay out of all of it. Gray’d been a chaplain, for crying out loud! And his unit got massacred. The National Guard from one small community gets called up, shipped into war without enough training, and eighteen of them come home in body bags. And there’s Grayson, right in the middle of it. Their chaplain, the man charged with getting brokenhearted soldiers through all that pain and suffering…

  The engine driving Carter’s thoughts screeched to a stop and all the thoughts behind slammed into it—bam, bam, bam. Grayson had been through hell. And now he was about to get blamed for something he didn’t do. Something Carter did.

  And it wouldn’t be the first time, either.

  Splashing water.

  Giggles.

  The whump, whump, whump of a broom hitting a rug.

  “Shhh, Becky. Shhh.”

  Grayson’s boots on the creek bank.

  Carter snatches them, turns and runs back across the creek.

  Becky reaches out to him.

  He shoves her aside and keeps running.

  Knocks her down and keeps running.

  Carter had made it to Hickman’s Thumb, and he leaned against one of the smaller boulders, panting. Not because he was out of breath but because the images had taken his breath away, clamped an iron band around his chest and squeezed.

  Could he really do the same thing again?

  There was movement off to his right. He turned, calling out, “Suuunny! Where are you?”

  The only response was a quiet so profound it roared in his ears. The silence all around him was more than just a condition. It had substance, and the air was heavy with it. An eerie chill raised gooseflesh on his arms.

  “Suuunny, come to Unka Car—”

  Something moved in a nearby thicket. The leaves of the bushes rattled.

  Carter instinctively straightened and began to back away slowly. More leaves rattled. He sucked in a ragged breath.

  A deer leaped out of the brush and bounded off through the woods. Startled, Carter jumped, maybe even grunted in surprise, as the whitetail doe vanished in the trees. Feeling foolish, he chuckled at his own edginess and turned back toward the big outcrop in the center of the pile of boulders.

  Riley Campbell stood ten feet away, grinning, holding a 30.06 pointed at Carter’s chest. His hammering heart leaped into an even faster rhythm then, so fast he couldn’t detect the individual beats, just a steady hum beneath his ribs.

  ***

  Maggie tenderly brushed a tendril of honey-blonde hair back from Sadie’s forehead and continued to murmur. It wasn’t a song, really, or even a tune. It was only a sound, like the buzzing of bees around a hive. She lay beside Sadie, who was stretched out on her pink blanket in the shade of a huge azalea bush on the far side of a flower-covered meadow from a huge rock jutting out of the ridge. Maggie lay close to the sleeping toddler, her lips brushing Sadie’s left ear, humming her tuneless noise so the sound of Mr. Carter calling Sadie’s name wouldn’t awaken her.

  The spot she’d chosen for Sadie’s nap was secluded, with brambles on three sides forming a natural fence. The low-hanging branches of the bush, which would be covered with huge pink or purple blossoms in the spring, granted the whole area a cool gloom. The poor little thing was worn out from walking; even riding on Maggie’s hip had exhausted her. And since she’d awakened the little girl as soon as it was light enough out to see and skipped her morning nap altogether, it wasn’t surprising that the child was falling asleep on her feet. As soon as Maggie spread out the blanket on the ground, Sadie’d popped her thumb into her mouth and was out in seconds—well before Maggie began to hear Mr. Carter calling in the distance. His voice got closer and closer, so she gently bunched the blankie up against Sadie’s right ear and hummed for all she was worth in her left.

  Maggie couldn’t let him find them. Not now! She’d tried to warn them, but they wouldn’t listen, and the darkness in Maggie’s head kept getting bigger and bigger. It had grown so huge during the night she couldn’t even close her eyes for the fear of it and had finally done the only thing she could think to do.

  She had to save Sadie from the gobbling monster. The others were grownups, she’d rationalized, so they’d be able to escape.

  Carter’s voice got louder and louder. It hadn’t roused the sleeping child yet, but he was getting closer. Should she gather Sadie up and try to make a run for it before she heard him? Because if that little girl heard her Unka Cardur calling…

  She turned the humming up a notch and tried to keep the sound constant, without a hitch between breaths. She grew as still as possible. Her heart thumped in her chest so loud she was afraid that sound would awaken the sleeping child. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t. She was so frightened, so alone. It was all she could do not to whimper. And so tired! The big blackness in her mind, the rumbling and boiling that threat
ened to eat her alive, had kept her wide awake all night.

  Her eyes began to close. She fought it, but her voice faltered and her vision blurred. Struggling to keep her eyes open, she saw through a forest of eyelashes something yellow. There were weights on her eyelids, and they closed, but with great effort she blinked them back open. A yellow butterfly? Did a yellow butterfly flutter out of the meadow and land on the ground beside her? She closed her eyes and blinked them open again more slowly. A white one came next. Two more yellows, a monarch and a blue landed on the limb of the azalea bush above her head. Before long, butterflies were everywhere, covering all the low branches of the bushes that stretched out to hide them.

  Then the slow opening and closing of their wings synchronized. All the wings opened at the same time and closed at the same time, like breathing in and out. But instead of generating a tiny movement of air with each beat, the wings generated silence. Open and closed. Quieter and quieter. Within seconds, Maggie could no longer hear the cicadas buzzing in the bushes on the high side of the meadow. She couldn’t hear the trees’ gentle creak or the birds chirp. And Mr. Carter’s voice—if, indeed, he was calling out at all anymore, was completely gone. The two little girls were wrapped in a butterfly silence so profound, Maggie could not even hear the sound of her own humming. Was she humming? Was she even awake? Or was she dreaming? She didn’t know. The world dissolved in a pale yellow light.

  Chapter 26

  Even with his damaged hearing, Grayson could make out the voices coming from Hickman’s Thumb long before he was close enough to be seen. The taut wire of his survival instinct vibrated, hummed, and he slipped into combat mode.

  He crept from tree to tree, getting closer and closer, angling down to the rock formation from higher up the mountain. At first, he couldn’t hear what was being said, but he picked up on the hostile tone and recognized Carter’s voice. When he was finally close enough to understand, he knew who else was talking.

  “Can’t be serious! You don’t really believe my brother would…?”

  “Don’t believe it. Know it! And he’s gonna pay for what he done. The both of you are.”

  “I thought we’d already been over that part, how I am the one McCullough in all of West Virginia who couldn’t possibly have—”

  “Oh, I checked you out. Don’t think I didn’t. I asked around, and you was where you said you was. I ain’t gonna shoot you ’cause you shot Zeke. I’m gonna put the both of you in the ground because one Campbell’s worth two McCulloughs—three, four, more’n a dozen! The two of you dead won’t even skim the surface of the debt. But it’s the best I can do right now, and I am proud I get to honor the blood of my daddy and my brother by spilling as much McCullough blood as I am able.”

  Riley ordered Carter to go over to the base of one of the large boulders scattered around the north side of the Thumb and sit down on a rock next to it. He told him they’d wait “real quiet-like” until they heard Grayson calling for his little girl.

  “You make one sound, you grunt, you hiccup, you even fart to warn him and—”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Carter challenged. “You’re going to kill me anyway. What’s to keep me from yelling my head off as soon as I hear him?”

  “—holler for them little girls that’s lost out here in the woods, the one that’s got McCullough blood in her too? If I can’t have the two of you, I’ll find that young’un and put the bullet in her that was meant for her daddy!”

  Grayson flattened himself against a tree and tried to think. He had to figure out what to do, and it had to be the right decision. Panic would get them all killed. He took a deep breath and recognized the calm that settled over him.

  Doin’ the necessary.

  The nearest weapon was at the house. It’d taken more than three hours to get here. Even going straight back home instead of angling up the mountain and back down, he couldn’t hope to make a round trip in much under four hours and he didn’t think Riley’s patience would hold out that long.

  If you’re outgunned, you have to outsmart. That’s what Sergeant Hotchner always said.

  Grayson was unarmed except for the Bowie knife on the belt of his fatigues, which was no match for a rifle at any distance greater than three feet!

  Well, there it was, then. He had to figure out a way to get within three feet of Riley. If Grayson could climb the Thumb, he could get above Riley. Even from that position, he wouldn’t be able to jump down on Riley unless the little man moved right up next to the granite slab and stood directly below him, down on the far end where the rock was less than fifteen feet tall. But Riley couldn’t get to Grayson either; he couldn’t climb with a rifle in his hands. And the rock was so wide, he couldn’t back up far enough to get a shot at Grayson on top of it.

  Grayson studied the terrain. With sides as smooth as an ice sculpture, the granite Thumb jutted out from the ridge into a clearing. But on the north side, there was a tumble of boulders and smaller rocks beside it, and Grayson could climb those to the top. Except that Riley and Carter were leaned against one of the boulders on that side and there was nothing but meadow—grass and ground cover maybe two feet tall—between the Thumb and the forest.

  How could he possibly get from the trees to the rocks without being seen?

  Rangers.

  Grayson had sat around many a fire listening to stories by and about the rangers, men who slithered like ghosts through the jungle into enemy encampments. Faces blackened, special camouflage, and those guys only ate Vietnamese food so they’d even smell like the gooks!

  He remembered what one of them had said one night.

  “It’s not about heavy cover. If you’ve got any cover at all, you can hide. The trick is not moving. The eye’s drawn to movement. You go slow enough, take an hour to go a foot, nobody will see you.”

  There was one spot where a bush extended out toward the rocks from the trees. There was ten or twelve feet of grass, two feet tall maybe, between the bush and the nearest rock. The sky was a sheet of slate gray. Over the course of the next few hours, the sun would begin to sink behind the mountain, and its shadow would extend out over this end of the meadow, not making it dark, but making it darker than it was now. Shadowy. He was dressed in camo and could rub dirt and lichen on his face and in his hair and use grass and weeds to break up the contour of his head and body.

  Twelve feet in…say two hours. That’d be rocket-fast for a ranger.

  Was he nuts? Riley was facing the other way, but one wrong move or maybe Riley just decides to walk this direction to take a leak, and Grayson would be a sitting duck.

  So Plan B was?

  There was no Plan B. Either he bailed out, left his brother to die, or he gave this a shot. Grayson’s heart began to bang, a stone pestle pounding a stone mortar, hammering his courage into dust. He turned and crept off into the woods to find dirt and lichen before he could change his mind.

  *

  Carter made a couple of vain efforts to talk some sense into Riley, but the trigger-happy little man jabbed the rifle in his direction and told him to shut his face and keep it shut. No noise.

  And so they waited.

  Carter was soon amazed by how patient Piper’s squirrelly older brother could be. He sat quiet. Didn’t fidget, didn’t pace or skulk around, peeking from behind the rocks at the woods. He was a man in a deer blind, waiting for the unsuspecting buck to walk into his sights so he could drop it with a shot through the heart. Riley figured to hear Grayson calling Sadie as he got near. It would be easy to get the drop on him.

  Carter sat coiled, waiting for an opening. Any moment of inattention and he intended to jump Riley. It’d probably get him killed, but it was better than dying and taking Grayson with him.

  Piper needed one of them to come out of this alive!

  “Care if I—?”

  Riley yanked the rifle up and glared at him.

  “Smoke?” he finished in a whisper.

  “Suit yourself,” Riley whispered back.

&nb
sp; So Carter smoked. One cigarette after another. The minutes crawled by. He sneaked a look at his watch—didn’t want to call attention to the fact that they’d been waiting a long time. He knew what Riley apparently didn’t. Piper must not have mentioned that he and Grayson were supposed to meet here at noon, and it was already past two o’clock. Where was he?

  Carter took the last drag off his next-to-last cigarette and flicked it away with his finger, watched it sail with a breeze past the grassy area about thirty feet behind Riley.

  Something there caught his eye. Could that possibly be…?

  He looked instantly away, fussed around, putting his lighter back into his pocket, and then fiddled with the package that contained the lone remaining cigarette.

  Making himself wait until he had counted slowly to five hundred, he reached up and scratched his forehead, momentarily hiding his eyes so Riley couldn’t see where he was looking.

  Was it…? No. Maybe…

  If there was even a chance, he needed to make sure Riley didn’t happen to glance that way.

  “Since it’s not likely I’m going to see another sunrise,” he whispered, so quietly Riley instinctively leaned a little toward him to hear, “would you indulge my curiosity. I’m just wondering…the Campbell clan totally out of the shine business?”

  Riley grunted a laugh under his breath.

  “Maybe.” He eyed Carter. “How ’bout you indulge my curiosity. I’ve heard rumors you might be involved in the trade—personally. Didn’t b’lieve none of ’em, of course.”

  “Well, you shoulda,” Carter whispered back. “I got five stills. I put the first one in Tree Frog Hollow. The spring there’s as clear as rainwater. Uncle William always said McCullough shine was the best hooch around because the water was better than anybody else’s. And he was right.”