The Curse of Crow Hollow

by Billy Coffey

  -2-

  Bucky pulled into the parking lot that circles the Holy Fire right ahead of Kayann and Landis Foster. They were in that fancy Mercedes, of course. And of course Kayann was driving. Both of them waved, though you could say Landis and Bucky seemed to mean it a little more. Angela, you could say she meant to wave at only one of them, and they all got out.

  Kayann had on a black dress that flaunted both the flatness of her stomach and the bulge of her chest. She hit a button on her keychain that made the Fosters’ car beep. Setting the alarm, even if near everybody in town would be inside that church and so disinclined to break and enter. Bucky rolled his eyes and tried not to let Landis see.

  Kayann asked Angela if she’d heard anything from Cordelia, Hays hadn’t bothered to call or text that morning. Bucky answered the same. Landis broke the silence that followed by making a joke that maybe Hays and Cordy had run off to get married and was met with more silence. Bucky said he was sure the kids would be there before the service started. Kayann said she hoped that was so, but a course it wasn’t. Hays wasn’t nowhere near church by then. He was tearing down the hill in his car from the Number Four, thinking the crow feather stuck to his collar and tickling the back of his neck was Alvaretta’s reaching fingers.

  Still, the four parents decided it best to maybe wait outside until Raleigh Jennings stepped out to ring the church bell, just in case the kids arrived. Townfolk came in a steady stream, men and women and children dressed in their finest, which round here meant the clothes least worn and faded. Briar Hodge arrived with Chessie. He parked his old truck near the front of the church and lumbered around to let her out, the two of them looking like lovebirds in the twilight of some gilded romance rather than the most wanted people in the county. Chessie puffed the bit of red hair in front of her eyes with her breath so she could see. She greeted the Fosters and Vests and told them to have a blessed day.

  Medric Johnston had the shortest walk of anybody in the Holler from home to church, having only to step acrost the street from the funeral parlor next door. He said hello to the little group near the steps and tried to ignore the fact that Kayann didn’t so much as lift her chin. Oh, I’m sure that coulda been on account of the way Hays had taken to spending so much of his time helping Medric with whatever poor soul had last fallen to death. Coulda also been that Medric Johnston belonged to a class and race that Kayann Foster considered well below her own. I’ll let you decide. But I guess Medric was used to being treated that way, him being just about the only black man in the Holler. I like to believe he could stand there smiling under Kayann’s glare because he was thinking of how it’d be to one day lay that woman down on the gurney in the funeral home’s basement and get her all prettied up to be put in the ground. Kayann’d probably make Landis buy the most expensive casket Medric had, which would be fine, and then Medric would dig the hole extra deep. That’d please him fine. Please Angela too.

  Doc Sullivan and Maris (who was not only wife of the town physician, but also sister to Mayor Bickford and aunt to Scarlett) stopped to visit on their way inside. Bucky was saying how fine a send-off Medric and the preacher had given Henrietta Friday evening, and how good she’d looked. Landis agreed with that, and not just because the Reverend and Belle Ramsay had all but cleaned out every bit of the grocery’s paper products and cake mix for the meal after. Whether you deal in goods or souls, ain’t much in this world better than a good death.

  Doc Sullivan said sometimes a person had to hang on until there was nothing left to grip, and after that comes the mourning. Medric took all in stride, telling Bucky and the doc that caring for a body’s like caring for a house—when you go away for good, it’s always best to make sure things is just so. Death was near as sacred to that man as life, maybe more, and he told Landis that was one of the things he was trying to teach his and Kayann’s boy. I guess that’s true. Course, Medric left out what he’d told Hays some weeks back, about how fickle a profession like tending to the dead can be. A man like Medric could pinch only so many pennies and stretch so many dollars before he’d get to pining for a few deaths to fill his pocketbook. Not many, a course, and not the young or those with mouths to feed, but maybe a few of the old and tired, eager for rest.

  Bucky’s attention turned to the wood double doors atop the church steps. Belle Ramsay had poked her head out, no doubt looking for Naomi. Behind her came the mayor, doing the same for his Scarlett. Both came down the steps, nodding and saying good morning to the worshipers flocking inside. The mayor asked Kayann if she’d heard anything of the party. There seemed no concern that nobody had. Belle said there wasn’t much trouble anybody could get into down at Harper’s Field.

  Had Angela overheard that statement, she would’ve disagreed. As it was, she’d been pulled aside by Landis and looked to have lost all connection to the world. He wanted to make sure she’d done the grocery’s ordering for the week. It’s hard to believe how such a petty thing as that could flush a grown woman’s cheeks, but it had. Yes, Angela told him, she’d done the ordering Wednesday, and she glanced at Bucky long enough to see him still talking to Medric and then said the truck should be there sometime in the next week. From then on, her eyes never left the man beside her. Landis ain’t a handsome man by any stretch—lanky to the point of gaunt, with thinning hair parted to the side and those round professor glasses always on his face—but the sight of him was enough to send a warm shiver down Angela’s leg that she’d long given up feeling guilty over.

  Don’t matter if they’s the ugliest soul who ever drew a breath, the first one you fall for always remains beautiful to you in some way, and the memories you have of the time you spent together get colored over in soft shades as the years wear on. It was like that with Angela. She’d dated Landis almost their whole senior year of high school and was to be engaged before Kayann stole him away. The hole Landis left in her heart back then had needed filling before she found herself sucked down into it forever. Next thing Angela knew, there’d been her and Bucky and a sky full of stars out in Harper’s Field one Friday night. It had been a fling, nothing more, some frantic way to get Landis jealous. Well, all that backfired when Angela come up great with child. She got a ring for graduation all right, just from a different boy and for a different reason. Landis’s daddy, Henderson Foster, had been kind enough to hire Angela on at the grocery once Cordelia was born, and Landis had been kind enough to keep her on all the years after. At least there was that.

  It was then that Raleigh Jennings carried his big frame outside the doors and pulled the rope on the tower bell. Bucky looked once more around the parking lot and then down the road for Scarlett’s little car, then made his way inside with Medric. Kayann, Belle, and the mayor followed. Landis kept talking on about a sale he wanted to do on the produce and if maybe the next truck should come Thursday instead of Friday, and Angela kept on letting him. She’d clung to the faith that says all things worked together the way they was intended, and she loved her family dearly. But it was mornings like that one, when the church bells had set to ringing and her and her husband had come to feel more like strangers than partners, that Angela must have entertained the idea things hadn’t worked out as intended at all. She paused at the top of the steps and looked down the long dirt road past the Exxon and the grocery. Watching for her daughter, who by then was in the front seat of that little Volkswagen bug, screaming that she couldn’t get the witch’s blood off Scarlett’s face.

  -3-

  Most everybody in the Holler had their assigned duties come Sunday service. Raleigh Jennings was no different. His place was to ring the bell and then sit on the metal chair in the foyer until it was time for the plates to be passed. And that was fine with Raleigh, because that’s about as close to the Lord as he could bear to get.

  Fifty-seven years old, gray and balding. Gut out to here, friend, and I ain’t kidding. Blood pressure high enough to be a constant reminder of his own mortality. Divorced near twenty years, his ex-wife, Eugenia, had fled to her
hundred-dollar-an-hour therapist up in Stanley. Weren’t the first time a married woman strayed with another man in these parts, don’t get me wrong there. But to have that woman up and leave was rare, and to have that woman escape Crow Holler altogether was unheard of. Eugenia’s leaving not only cost Raleigh a broken heart that would never heal and seven hundred dollars a month in alimony he didn’t have, it very nearly cost him his job as principal of the high school and a place on the town council, too.

  He set the stack of unused bulletins back in the holder nailed to the wall and watched as Reverend Ramsay came to the pulpit. Tall and fit with a full head of brown hair, trying to hold his smile at the empty place between Angela and Bucky and the other one between Landis and Kayann. That smile faded all the way when the Reverend looked at Belle, alone in the front row.

  Raleigh could’ve told all a those watching parents that’s how it would be. He saw enough young people go in and out at the high school to know kids had no respect these days—not for their parents, not for their town, certainly not for their God. They’d rather be out in the woods somewhere, fornicating with any and all and drinking up Chessie’s moonshine. Sure, there was an agreement between the Hodges and both the mayor and the Reverend that Chessie would be left alone so long as she kept her poison outside the Holler and the town’s pockets lined. But Raleigh’d heard enough talk in the school hallways to know that was a lie. He leaned his head forward and out the door, straining the chair beneath him. Scarlett and her horde weren’t nowhere to be seen, but there was one person watching close.

  Round the corner on the side of the street between the church and the funeral home, Raleigh could see a sliver of the hood on John David’s truck. The boy hadn’t stepped foot in the Holy Fire since coming back to the Holler, had barely spoken to his momma and to his daddy not at all. People said all that fighting had changed John David and turned him a stranger to the town and himself. Raleigh leaned forward as much as he could without having to stand, thinking maybe he should have a little talk with John David soon. Take him out to the woods to meet the others, but first make sure the boy wouldn’t go blabbing to that nosy Chessie Hodge. Maybe Raleigh’d do just that very thing. Maybe war had shown John David the truth of things.

  The Reverend’s last announcement was for the council meeting at the end of the week, and here Chessie turned her head—not out the door, but to Raleigh. She grinned that way she always did, like a cat that’s cornered a mouse to play with. Raleigh could only smile back. What had saved his standing in town after the divorce hadn’t been the Reverend’s absolution or the mayor’s blessing, it was the Hodges’. Chessie had put her foot down and said Eugenia Jennings had never been a good woman and everybody knew it, so Raleigh should keep right on serving Crow Holler as he always had.

  When all was said and done, most everybody got what they wanted. Mayor Bickford didn’t have to go through the hassle of another council election or help the county find another principal for a school that would get shut down in a few years anyway, Reverend Ramsay didn’t have to go through the agony of kicking out the church’s head deacon, and Chessie Hodge got her own mouthpiece on the town council. You could say everybody made out just fine except for old Raleigh.

  Everybody stood for the opening hymn. Raleigh kept his seat and leaned out the open door, watching shadows ease up the steps.

  It was like them kids had been waiting for just that time to come in, thinking no one would notice. They snuck around the corner of the church and up the steps past Raleigh in two clumps—Scarlett and Naomi first, then Cordy and Hays. They’d changed out their party clothes, thanks to some fast driving by Scarlett and Hays, but wasn’t a thing them kids could cover of their blank faces and trembling hands. And if you looked close enough, you could see a faint streak of red down the center of Scarlett’s nose. They branched off for their parents as Raleigh readied the offering plates. Cordelia snuck down the center aisle and sidled up to her daddy on the end. Bucky put an arm around her as Belle smiled at Naomi and the mayor slipped Scarlett a kiss on the cheek. Hays’s parents barely registered his presence when he sat next to them in their regular place at the center aisle, near to the back.

  Something was wrong with those kids. I think Raleigh knew that the second he laid eyes on them. Some a them parents knew it too. Surely the rest of the young people did, most of them having spent the night before up in Harper’s Field waiting for a party that never started. And I’ll tell you this: the way they’d seen Scarlett and the rest come into church—like they weren’t trying to hide something as much as they were trying to push something away—only made them want to know more what had gone on.

  Reverend Ramsay finished his welcome when the piano ended (smiling at his little Naomi as he did) and called for the offering. Three men stood and joined Raleigh in the back. He handed them each a silver plate and kept one for himself, then the group walked to the front and began casting for tithes.

  The plates came back filled with more silver than paper, but it was the paper that Raleigh spied when he wasn’t looking at Scarlett or Cordelia. He could pass the plate and say the prayer and offer two amens every Sunday, could dispense wisdom during council meetings and roam the halls of the high school as a person of moral authority. That’s what everybody saw. What they didn’t see was all the times Raleigh dipped into the offering when nobody was looking just so he could make Eugenia’s blessed alimony payment. Or that all the shrewdness he spouted at the council meetings was just whatever Chessie Hodge whispered in his ear to say. Or how sometimes he stayed after school with Ruth Mitchell, the school’s secretary, and how Ruth would leave sometime later with her dress wrinkled and her hair mussed and some extra grocery money to take home to Joe and their two brats. All that was hidden, you see. Just like all those times Raleigh sat alone in the darkness of his little house with a pistol in his hand, praying for the Lord to show mercy enough to pardon one final sin. Or the meetings Raleigh led deep in the woods with the Circle, talking on about the cleansing holy war that neared them all.

  They collected the plates and brought them to the front. Raleigh turned at the altar and waited for the ushers to be seated, then he said, “Let’s go to the Lord.”

  He got as far as Our gracious heavenly Father when Cordelia stood up. Bucky held out his hand like he was either trying to help or trying to sit her back down. Cordy brushed it aside and stepped into the aisle, lurching for the door.

  Raleigh continued on—We thank Ye for these blessings—when Cordy stumbled.

  A soft Ooh rose from the congregation. Reverend Ramsay opened his eyes.

  And we ask that Ye bless these tithes and offerings was followed by Cordelia knocking herself into the pew where Hays sat with his family. Raleigh stopped his praying as Cordy’s eyes grew huge. The left side of her face began to slacken as though the skin there was about to slough off. Her eyes melted to horror as she looked beside her and uttered one mangled word:

  “Hayth?”

  And then she fell hard to the wood floor.

  A rumble came over the congregation that built like a summer storm, calm turning to swirl. Bucky and Angela rushed for their little girl. Landis Foster got to her first, shaking her and hollering her name.

  Then Belle Ramsay hollered Naomi as her daughter began to seize. Naomi’s arms and legs jerked, making her fall from the front pew and onto the floor. Foam crept from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were nothing but whites.

  Scarlett screamed and then seized her throat with her hands, acting as if she were choking. The mayor shot up from his pew and grabbed for her, panicking as blood began dripping from her nose.

  They all started screaming then, friend, every man, woman, and child inside the Holy Fire. Doc Sullivan was bent over Cordelia, trying to wake her. His wife tried to stanch the bleeding from her niece’s nose. Mayor Bickford was hollering at Scarlett, trying to get her to speak, to say something. Scarlett only stood there, bleeding and silent and holding her throat. And that was when all them y
oung kids who’d missed Scarlett’s party realized something horrible had happened, and when they all started getting jealous that it hadn’t happened to them. Raleigh could only stand there with his hands still clasped in prayer, trying to take in all he saw and hearing nothing, not even the Reverend hollering. Telling Raleigh to call the ambulance, call everybody.

  -4-

  Took both Mattingly’s ambulances to get them kids out the church and up to the hospital in Stanley, some thirty miles off. Both packed full, leaving the parents and those concerned to follow on their own. It was, so far as I know, the shortest Sunday service Crow Holler ever had.

  The nurse behind the glass window inside the hospital’s emergency room said the girls would have to be tended to alone for the time being. That left everybody with nothing to do but wait and pray. They all found an empty corner to settle themselves—Bucky and Angela, the Fosters (Landis, Kayann, and a shaken Hays), the mayor, the Reverend and Belle—away from the thirty or so others who’d found misfortune enough to be in such a place that morning. Chessie and Briar Hodge had made the trip, too, as had Medric, whose face had gone ashen by the time he arrived. He sat beside Angela, who said what was on everybody’s mind when she asked the undertaker what had brought him there. Trolling for clients is what she guessed. Medric held his head in his hands and said that wasn’t so, he’d come for Hays because Hays was his friend, all them kids were. I’d say that didn’t sit too well with Landis and Kayann. Angela told Medric not to worry, things would be fine, then looked upset when Medric didn’t say the same.

  Doc Sullivan went back with the girls, leaving his wife to do what she did best—comfort. Maris was a Bickford before she became a Sullivan, and though she was the mayor’s older sister by near twenty years and had spent much of her adult life outside the Holler, we still counted her as one of our own. She went from one family to the next, and by the time she reached the last, that whole area of the waiting room had gone silent from shock. You could almost hear their hearts and minds winding down to a slow hum.