by Ninie Hammon
In sport rock climbing, you got points for form. You didn’t drag your upper body over the edge of some mountain peak on your belly, hauling the rest of your exhausted self over the final hump by crawling forward in panting relief. Oh no, you kept your back straight, lifted with your arms, stepped gracefully up onto the summit.
In sport rock climbing, you got to select the difficulty level, so you could choose to climb only what you were capable of climbing.
In sport rock climbing, you were strapped into a harness and dangling from a rope. You affixed yourself to the cliff face every ten or fifteen feet with various pieces of rock-climbing equipment. As you climbed, the rope ensured that you were never in danger of falling any farther than the last piece of protection.
Malachi was in danger of falling every second now, every breath could topple him and the difficulty level of the climb was far above his pay grade.
Once he could open his eyes without getting dizzy, he scooted on his back slowly, pivoting so that his head was finally above his feet on the slanted rock. Then he inched himself into a sitting position with his back against the cliff face.
Don’t look down. Never look down.
But down was the only place there was to look. Correction. Out over the vast expanse of Dragonroot Hollow was the only place to look, but the ground there was down — waaaaay below his current elevation. Without leaning out over the edge of the rock outcrop — which he had no intention of doing — he couldn’t see what was directly below him, the base of the cliff and the riverbank. He could only assume that Duncan Norman was … that Duncan’s body was lying somewhere down there.
The rock crack ran right alongside where he sat, snaking up the cliff face. He scooted upward, with his back against the cliff, until he was standing. Then he could reach his left hand into the crack. The edges were only a couple of inches wide at that point, but it widened as he stuck his hand farther into it. He shoved his hand as deep into the crack as he could and made a fist — which wouldn’t fit back through the opening of the crack’s edges. That secured him in place and he turned his body veeeeery carefully around until he was facing the cliff. With ever-so-gentle movements, he toed off his shoes and socks. They were running shoes with thick rubber soles. He had to be able to feel for toe holds with his feet the same way he’d feel for hand holds with his fingers. Besides, the shoes were so wide he couldn’t even have jammed them into the crack. He placed his bare feet into the crack, jamming them in sideways, one at a time, and then balanced on them, his body held to the rock face by his fist in the crack. The rocks had already sandpapered the skin off the top of his hand and forearm, then off both feet. His toes pinched painfully in the narrow space.
He started up.
Reaching as high as he could in the crack, he felt around, his fingers searching for any irregularity he could grasp. When he found a hand hold, he carefully moved his feet, one after the other, out of the crack and jammed them into a higher spot, pulling himself upward with the hand hold and pushing himself up with his legs, balanced on his jammed-into-the-crack feet.
Time came completely unhooked from reality. He had been there an hour. Or five hours. Or thirty minutes. Or two days. This wasn’t about wonky Jabberwock time, it was about the telescoping of normal time under dangerous conditions. He’d been there before. The adrenaline that fear dumped into his body gave him the strength and endurance he needed, but as it wore off, his muscles ached. His scraped feet bled, joined by raw, bleeding hands and fingers, the right hip and shoulder he’d landed on hurt and the knot on the back off his head throbbed.
Sweat ran into his eyes and he had no hand to wipe it away.
Life, existence, his whole world shrank to the rock right in front of his nose, his fingers frantically searching around for something to grasp, something to use to pull himself upward.
At one point, his foot, slick with blood, slipped as he was trying to reposition it in the crack and for a desperate few seconds, he was held to the mountainside by nothing more than his fingers’ grip on a three-inch ledge of rock.
At another point, he searched as high as he could reach with his hands and found nothing but smooth rock. No hand hold, not the slightest dent in the surface. His leg muscles were quivering with fatigue, but he took the only chance he had. He thrust himself violently upward with his feet to extend his reach, fingers scrabbling, searching for … there was a crack in the smooth rock in the back of the crack he was climbing. It wasn’t even two inches wide, but he jammed the four fingers of his right hand into it, and crimped his fingers, holding himself in place with the pressure of his knuckles against the rock.
Then the crack ended. Above it was smooth rock, and about four feet beyond that was a bush, old and gnarled, growing out of a crevice to the right. Either Malachi trusted that the bush would hold him … and if it didn’t …
He moved his feet up the crack until he was crouched at the top of it, then in a single explosive move, he straightened up and shoved off with his feet, his hands out, grasping for the bush.
For a breathless moment he was off balance, his weight shifting back away from the rock. Away and downward. Then he snatched hold of the bush, grabbed a handful of limbs, felt it give, then hold firm.
He grabbed the bush with both hands then and hauled himself slowly up the smooth rock face beneath it, his knees skinning along the rock.
He hugged the bush to his chest as soon as he could. It was the farthest down of the bushes that grew just below the top of the cliff, and he dragged himself from that bush to the next one above it, clawed and scrabbled and crawled up through the bushes until he was able to shove himself belly first onto the rocky top of the cliff.
He got no points for form, just crawled on his belly until he could get first one knee and then the other over the edge, then shoved himself forward until his whole body was lying on the rocks at the top.
He lay there, panting, sweating, his heart pounding out of his chest. When he caught his breath, he didn’t trust himself to stand, so he crawled away from the cliff’s edge into the trees, then sat, leaning his back against a gnarled oak, looking out over the vista.
He used the tree to pull himself to his feet and staggered away from the cliff. He probably ought to have gone to the edge and looked over, tried to see if he could see Duncan. Call out to him. Or at least locate Duncan’s body. But he could not force himself to go anywhere near the cliff’s edge, just lurched from one tree to the next to the parking lot and staggered across it to Charlie’s car. His legs were weak and wobbly from exertion and when he pulled open the driver’s side door, he plopped into the seat, then slowly turned and lifted both feet onto the floorboard.
He leaned his head on the steering wheel. And maybe he sobbed.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Rose had known who it’d be soon’s they told her about the visitor. Knew it’d be that Cotton Jackson again, of course it was, had to be. Stink Bug had told her she didn’t have to see him today, that they could make him come back tomorrow. He was supposed to give a whole twenty-four-hour notice when he called, and he hadn’t done it. She’d told Stink Bug to go suck an egg.
He’d said last time he was here that everybody in Nowhere County had vanished in a puff of smoke, disappeared. Just like them folks, her mother’s kin, done in Gideon a century ago. She’d been thinking about that Jackson fella ever since he left. Knew he wasn’t done asking her things, that’d he’d be back wanting to know more stuff. She hadn’t decided yet if she was gonna tell him or no.
Stink Bug knocked softly on her door and then opened it even those Rose didn’t say nothing about her coming in.
“Mr. Jackson is at the reception desk, asking if he can speak to you. Are you sure—?”
“What, you think I changed my mind since I told you not half an hour ago that it was fine by me to have a visitor? You’d save yourself a whole lot of trouble if you’d just listen the first time.”
The woman turned and walked away a huff.
&
nbsp; The man knocked on the doorjamb of her open door, stood there polite until she said he could come in. He looked awful, like he hadn’t slept a wink since the last time she talked to him. He looked worn thin, not his skinny body, but his whole self worn thin, like he was rubbed down to almost nothing at all.
He just didn’t understand, didn’t realize that wouldn’t matter what she told him or didn’t tell him, what he done or didn’t do, the Jabberwock was gonna do whatever it wanted to do. She tried to tell him that, but he was bound and determined to find out about her mama and the Jabberwock.
She hadn’t never shared that part, hadn’t never told a living soul, had kept those secrets tucked away in her heart her whole life, ever since her mother told her about them when Rose was a little girl.
And told her. And told her.
Everything Mama said about that time, she repeated again and again. Rose supposed she didn’t have nothing else but that to talk about, or might be she done it because she wanted Rose to remember, told her so many times so she wouldn’t forget.
And she didn’t forget. Them memories filled her mind just like they was her very own.
Lily Topple crawls along the ground, bent over so her face is only inches above the forest floor. Slow as she can go, she plows a path about two feet wide through the blanket of leaves, lifts each leaf, one at a time until she gets down to bare dirt. She picks up every object as she comes to it — every rock, stick, twig, stem, bug, beetle, worm, caterpillar, pebble, acorn or pinecone — and lays it aside in the bare-dirt trench on her right, the ground she’s already cleared. She’s careful that the path she is now plowing along the forest floor butts up perfectly against the one she cleared in her last pass, not so much as an inch of it unexamined.
When she finds one, or anything she thinks might be one, she puts it in the basket she drags on the ground behind her — the one Mama’d been making. Mama and some other ladies would sit on rocks by the waterfall in the cool of the evening, talking about everything and nothing, listening to the rush of water, weaving the strips of oak bark together. Lily’s mother had already made a big basket of willow limbs — big enough for Lily to climb into and sit down — and that’s where she kept the strips of oak bark. Both the baskets, the big one and the unfinished one — were still sitting where Mama’d left them beside that rock when Lily came back into town after she spent the night in the woods.
Lily washes off everything she finds and then examines it in bright sunlight. And if she isn’t sure, she puts it in the duffel bag with the others just in case.
She is careful, oh, so very careful, because she can’t miss a single one. Not one. And the little finger on a kid, a two-year-old maybe, isn’t very big at all.
Her back hurts. She is hot and tired, the sun beats down on her through breaks in the trees and she considers giving up. Like she considered it yesterday and the day before. She’s done listened to all the arguments in her head a dozen times.
Wasn’t no reason to do such a thing, pick up all them bones — what for?
Wasn’t no way she could find them all, even if she decided to try. Bones was little things, some of them, and she wasn’t rightly sure what bones looked like, not all of them anyway. Everybody could pick out a skull, of course, but some bones like a little toe. What did that look like? And she couldn’t gather them up if’n she didn’t even know what she was looking for.
And what then? When she found them all, what then? What’s she s’posta do with them? What’s the point in finding the bones if she ain’t got nothing to do with them once she done it?
There are other arguments besides those, lots more, but she has gotten so accustomed to ignoring them that the little ones finally give up trying to convince her. The bigger arguments still try now and then, though, particularly like now, when she is hot and tired, and knows there are many many more hours of daylight and she must use every minute. As she has used up all the minutes of every day since she made the decision. How long has it been? Days. Some days. Not weeks, she doesn’t think. But could be. It doesn’t matter. If it takes her a week or a month or a year … doesn’t matter. She has purposed in her heart to do the thing, and the difficulty or the time it takes don’t matter. She’ll do it ‘cause she said she would. Pa had raised her that way. You done what you purposed in your heart to do and the least she could do, now that Pa and the others was gone, was be the kind of person he’d intended her to be when he was teaching her all them lessons.
She knows this is what Pa’d want her to do. That’s why, the only reason why that makes any sense. Her Pa had tried to talk them others out of scattering the bones of the Jitter Dancers, said it wasn’t right, that they ought not do such a thing. Her Pa was maybe the only miner in the whole camp who’d flat out refused to participate.
He’d said he wouldn’t do a wrong thing like that. So she knows in her heart he approves of her trying to set it right.
And there is the other reason.
Maybe the bones … maybe scattering the bones is why …
There had to be a why, didn’t there? She had sat huddled in a corner of her empty house for days, not doing nothing but trying to figure out what had happened to all them people. And why it had happened.
The mine foreman didn’t know. Mr. Tackett had come looking, of course, when didn’t none of the miners show up for work, got all up in arms about it. She was sure he’d do something. But he only come that one time and never returned.
She was just a little girl, not even a woman yet, so what did she know? But them bones … was it about them bones? The company man made them get rid of the bones and the next morning the whole town was … gone. Was that why?
And the haints — Lily knows they’s real because she’s heard their wail … Is it possible that maybe the haints is all that’s left of the people them bones used to be? Haints was in cemeteries, the ghosts of dead people. So did these bones have ghosts, too, but out there in the woods since they’d been buried in a cave ‘stead of a cemetery? Was it their ghosts that wailed in misery at night, raising the hair on the back of her neck with their mournful cries?
Lily never does settle the whole thing in her mind. She just does what seems right to do.
Her Pa thought them bones ought to be respected. Well, she could do that. She could do that much for her Pa. And if them bones was somehow the reason the vanishing happened … then maybe if she gathered them all up. Maybe …
And so every day she ignores the voices in her head that try to convince her that her effort is wasted. That ain’t no use to be doin’ what she’s doing. Every day, all day, she combs the forest floor. She made herself a plan ‘fore she ever started, gathered up rocks and used them to mark out lines through the trees so she wouldn’t miss nothing. Wasn’t a big stand of woods, but it was thick and there was lots of brush. She works from the time the sun clears the top of Hazzard Bluff to the east until it’s too dark to see. Stops only to pee and eat — a small portion of meat from the smoke house that didn’t vanish, fruit, berries and mushrooms — Pa taught her how to tell the good ones from the ones that’d make you sick.
Springtime turns into summer and the leaves is starting to turn them pretty colors and fall off the trees before she has searched all the woods where the miners went. Every inch.
She is certain she has every bone that Rufus Giddings’d spotted in that burial cave, the bones Mr. Tackett dumped out of the duffle bags on the ground in front of Mr. Milliken.
She finishes the last bit at sunset and goes to bed, curled up in a ball on the floor where her bed had been, in the empty house where she’d lived with her family all around her, with the town all around her, until …
The next morning, she walks around the stand of woods, checkin’ to make sure there is no area she has neglected to search.
Nope. She has them all.
She sits down, gathering herself for what comes next, on the bottom step of the house where the Finneys lived. It’s so close to the Carthage Oak it is in the shad
e all day long. It will be a long, hard haul, carrying the duffle bags she has filled with bones up the mountainside. She had best get to it.
Rose’s mama Lily had told her where she took the pile of bones and what happened after she done it. And what she did then — because the Jabberwock told her to. Rose hadn’t never told anybody about any of that.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Moses got lost five minutes after he left Cotton Jackson’s house.
And so he drove down one winding mountain road after another. For half an hour or five hours or ten minutes — he didn’t know. There were no road signs, or they were so full of bullet holes they were unreadable. Why would you use a road sign for target practice? And even if there had been signs, Jolene had laid out for him a different route back to Nashville than the way he’d come. She’d said it was the best way to go and he hadn’t argued with her because he didn’t want to spend the time arguing. He wanted to leave. Had to leave. Had to get out of there, away from that house, those people.
The imperative to flee now, now, now was thrumming so loud in his head he had trouble concentrating on what she’d said. On his way to Nower County, he had taken Interstate 65 North to near Bowling Green, then some parkway east, he couldn’t remember the name of it — Nunn something. He’d gotten confused on it because it’d just ended in some place called Somerset and he’d had to find another road to another place called London and from there took another parkway, the Rogers parkway, he thought, east into the Kentucky mountains.
Jolene had said it would be less confusing if he merely went back to London — he’d told her he was sure he could find that, but he had been bluffing, he wasn’t sure at all — and then take Interstate 75 from London due south to Knoxville. Straight line, can’t get lost. And then Interstate 40 due west from Knoxville to Nashville. He’d find his way home once he got to Tennessee. Or maybe he wouldn’t. He didn’t care a fig about that. All he wanted was out of Nower County. All he wanted was to cross the county line … and forget it all! He could wander aimlessly around after that, he didn’t care, just so long as he couldn’t remember …
