by Billy Coffey
“Tully,” John David said.
Briar went back to his pipe.
The car stopped at a respectful distance. Tully Wiseman stepped out with his head near bowed. In a moment of sheer humility that made Briar chuckle, the drunk lifted his hands in surrender.
“Ain’t no need for that, Tully Wiseman,” Chessie called. “Put your hands down and act like the man your momma raised. Come on up here and see us.”
Tully smiled and approached. He wasn’t yet fifty and already missing most of his teeth, which made him look nearer a hundred.
“Ain’t you supposed to be cuttin’ meat down to the grocery by now?” Chessie asked.
“I’ll be there directly, Miss Chessie. Landis said to come on when I could.” He chanced a step closer. “Our Daisy’s fallen ill by the witch’s hand. Woke up this morning mute. Cain’t speak a’tall. Me and Lorraine took her to see the doc.”
Another step. Tully lifted the cap from his head. His hand trembled so bad you’d wonder if Alvaretta’s demon hadn’t gotten him too.
Chessie stopped rocking. “Sick, you say?”
“Yes’m. Other’n too.”
Briar cocked his head. “It bad at the clinic, Tully?”
“Oh, it’s a mess, Mr. Briar. Whole place is full up. Everybody getting it now.”
“Guess we know why Maris called up to Bucky,” Chessie said. “Word of Alvaretta’s out. You have our sympathies, Tully. I fear we’re in for a dark time.”
“Amen,” Tully said. “Don’t want to intrude, Chessie. Briar. I don’t come with my hand out, neither. Can’t make it to Mattingly for my groceries, not with Daisy being so bad. I wouldn’t even go to work if the money weren’t so sorely needed. Gotta swallow my pride as it is, knowing my pay’s coming from a man whose boy helped bring this on. Hays and that Scarlett. I hear going to the mines was all on her.”
“You heard right,” Chessie said. “You come up here because you got a thirst. That the groceries you need?”
Tully bowed his head for an answer.
“Don’t sell to Crow Holler,” Briar told him. “It’s been agreed. You know that, Tully.”
“I do, Mr. Briar, I know. But like you said, Chessie, it’s a dark time. I’m in pain for my little one.”
Briar looked to his wife. She studied Tully with a gaze that made him shrink himself smaller than he was. You could see the rage burning just behind her eyes, the kind that begins as pity to the helpless before turning to rage against the weak.
“Jar’ll last you no more’n a day,” she said. “Then what? You’ll be back, and you’ll bring along every man and woman inside a dozen miles who spend their days figuring how and when they’s gonna get buggered next. Reverend’s apt to haul us to give an account in front of the church. You want that, Tully?”
“I won’t speak of it. Swear on the Book, Chessie.”
Tully raised his empty eyes and met Chessie’s own, and I believe her heart cracked at that sight—a father stricken and wounded, knowing the girl he’d once bucked on his knee and still called Flower had fallen to the witch.
“You leave the money with John David. He’ll get you a jar.”
Tully bowed again. Looked like a peasant, he did, thankful for crumbs from the queen’s table. He smiled through his tears.
John David did as directed, then watched in silence as Tully left, drinking as he went, swerving his car as he got back on the road. Briar said nothing, only sucked on his pipe. The sweet smell of cherry filled the air. A worried look crept across Chessie’s face. She rocked forward in her chair and opened her mouth, like she was meaning to tell John David to get out to the end of the lane and get that jar back. But she didn’t, friend. Chessie only leaned back in her chair again, and that choice would come back to haunt her. I said it was like that woman could see what was going to happen before it did. That’s true, but not that time. Nosir, not that time.
-5-
About the fourth time Bucky’s phone rang, he decided he couldn’t ignore the mayor anymore. Angela must’ve told where Bucky’d run off to. That woman couldn’t keep a secret if her life depended on it.
Wilson Bickford was screaming in midsentence when Bucky answered, wanting to know why in the world Maris would call Bucky Vest instead of her own brother, wanting to know a dozen other things, and Bucky could only answer that he guessed it was because Maris didn’t want to get yelled at. He did the best he could to remember exactly what Maris had said, which wasn’t much in the way of detail.
“And she didn’t say anything else?” Wilson asked, and as that was the third time he’d done so, Bucky chose not to answer at all. “She probably thought she was calling me the whole time, Bucky. I had my phone on. Maris can’t see to dial the numbers right. She’s my sister and I love her, but that woman’s blind as a bat.”
“All I know’s Maris wants me down there straightaway. Sounded none too calm about it, neither. Why don’t you just call Maris and ask her yourself?”
“I tried,” the mayor said. “Ain’t nobody answering.”
Bucky pressed on the gas, willing the Celebrity to go faster. Thirty miles to Crow Holler from the hospital in Stanley. More than an hour, given the back roads. He weaved in and out as he pressed the phone to his ear, doing his best to dodge the morning traffic, long haulers and minivans mostly, everybody going on as usual without a care of what was going on in the lonely corners of the world.
“Alvaretta,” the mayor said. “You believe that, Bucky? What’d our kids get us all into?”
“I don’t know, Wilson.”
“We gotta try and stay ahead of this. The council. Landis is already involved, but we’ll have to bring Raleigh Jennings in at some point too. The Reverend. Shoot, we’ll have to get Chessie and Briar involved, even if I don’t want to. You’re with me, Bucky. Ain’t you? No matter what comes of this.”
Not a question. Bucky would back whatever play Wilson had to do next. He’d been following Wilson around ever since they were coming up, and for some reason Wilson never minded it. Them two played on the same Little League teams in the summer and the same Peewee football teams in the fall, and once high school come along and Bucky had to admit he couldn’t play with the big boys, Wilson made sure he became the team manager for both. Wilson made sure Bucky was accepted, because he knew that’s what Bucky needed. Aside from his constabling, that’s maybe what Bucky had always needed most.
“Remember our senior year, Bucky? The game against Lexington? Everybody said we didn’t stand a chance, bunch of hicks against those guys. But what happened?”
Bucky smiled at the windshield. You wouldn’t think it possible, given what he’d gone through the past day, but it was true. It was a grin full of memory for a time when his life was brighter and clearer than it’d been before or since. My, that had been a grand time in Bucky’s life. In everybody’s life, really. The only dark spot was that Stu Graves had killed himself only a week before, and what people who weren’t talking about Wilson Bickford’s golden arm were talking about Alvaretta’s revenge.
“Beat ’em,” Bucky said.
“You got that right. We won state. Crow Holler’s one and only time.”
Bucky smiled. “Don’t remember a ‘we’ there, Wilson. You won. Ain’t nobody played a game like you did that night. It was like you was playing for your life.”
“I was.” And in a small waiting room all the way back in Stanley, Wilson Bickford grinned. Was a pain in that smile, though. You’d’ve seen the mayor right then, you’d know he was scared to death, and with good reason. Alvaretta knew him. And if Alvaretta knew him, she knew what he’d done.
“Well, all I did was carry the jockstraps.”
“We were a team, Buck. Don’t you let me hear you say otherwise.”
You can still see that trophy, hanging there in the foyer of Crow Holler Secondary. It’s gone tarnished a bit over the years, but if you look close at the faded photograph above, you can still see the young faces of Wilson Bickford and Bucky Vest looki
ng at the camera, Wilson in his uniform and Bucky in a pair of tan pants and a white shirt.
“Now you get up there,” the mayor said, “you call me. Let me know what’s going on.”
“I will,” Bucky said.
He pushed the Celebrity to sixty.
-6-
Back then, the Crow Hollow Health and Wellness Center’s where everybody went when they come down with something either prayer or folklore couldn’t chase. That little building was Doc Sullivan’s pride and joy. It ain’t there no more, sad to say. Got boarded up along with the school after the Trouble. Anybody in the Holler gets sick now, they got to make the drive to Doc March down in Mattingly. Shame it’s gotta be that way. But like I told you, whole lotta people are gone from here now that the demons is loose. Danny Sullivan, he might be missed most of all. People liked that man, even if they mostly thought him heathen.
He’d brought Maris home to Crow Holler some twenty years before, right about the time Wilson was scrambling up and down the field in the Big Game and seeing Stu Graves’s face on every Lexington player that came after him. The clinic was no more’n a few hundred square feet, just enough for a waiting room, an office, and a room for Danny to look over the sick. Not a big crowd, usually. Maris used to say if the doc seen fifty people in a week, it was rare.
Wasn’t no fifty people Bucky saw waiting there that morning. It was more a hundred. Mommas and daddies and grandparents, all standing in the hot sun with their young ones in tow. Maris moved down the line with a little clipboard, writing things down and patting people’s shoulders. If Bucky’d been close to scared on that drive back to the Holler, he was near petrified now. Alvaretta hadn’t just come for his daughter—she’d come for his town too.
He had to park a ways off and walk the road back, taking a hard left into all those angry-looking faces.
“What’s all this, now?” he asked.
Nobody said a word back, not even Maris. Maybe it was the stupidity of the question that stumped them all. Even to Bucky, it was plain what all that was. All he had to do was look beside him at Ruth Mitchell, whose daughter, Chelsea, was jerking her head and feet like she was listening to music only she could hear. Tears stained her green eyes.
“You tell us, Constable,” Ruth said. “Chelsea woke me an Joe up like this last night, and we ain’t been able to get her settled down since.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Ruth,” Bucky said. “You tell me what I can do to help.”
“You done enough,” someone shouted.
Maris grabbed Bucky’s arm and yanked him toward the clinic door, through a valley of rage so hot he couldn’t bring himself to look at the people’s faces. She shoved him into the little office off from the waiting area and slammed the door.
“You crazy, Buck?” she asked. “Waltzing up in here like nothing’s happened?”
“Well maybe I wouldn’t have if I knew what was going on,” Bucky said. “You didn’t tell me anything.”
“You see all those people out there? Think I had time to explain things? Now sit here and keep quiet until Danny comes in.”
“I can’t do that, Maris. You need to let me try to calm things down.”
“You go out there right now, those people will tear you apart.” She took a breath and straightened herself, adjusted the collar around her wrinkled neck. “Please, Bucky. They know.”
“Know what?” Bucky asked.
“They know what your kids did.”
She let that hang in the air and backed out through the door to a room full of hollering people, leaving Bucky to ponder who had betrayed the mayor. He never did come up with an answer. He was too busy worrying about the other thing Maris had just told him, and how she’d put it.
Not that everybody knew what Alvaretta had done.
No, what your kids did.
-7-
Right about the time the doctors told Angela they were letting Cordy go, Danny Sullivan snuck into his office looking every bit of his sixty-two years.
“I’m sorry about Maris,” he said to Bucky. “Once her stress reaches a certain point, she becomes someone else. I can’t blame her today, though. I’ve never seen such a thing. A dozen already.”
“Girls,” Bucky said. “Right, Danny? All the sick ones are girls?”
“Very perceptive, Constable. You’re right. Not a sick male among them.”
“What’s that mean?”
The doctor picked up the stack of files on the corner of the desk and waved them into a thick fan. “I’ve had four patients so far suffering from various tremors and spasms, just like Naomi. Another four are reporting the same lack of speech function that’s affected Scarlett. Three have lost feeling in various parts of their bodies. That sound familiar, Buck? And I have one—I can’t divulge her name, so don’t bother asking—who swears Alvaretta came to her in the night to say we’re all going to die.”
“Lord have mercy,” Bucky said.
“The Lord doesn’t have anything to do with it, Constable. And neither does Alvaretta Graves.”
“What you trying to say, Danny?”
The doctor sighed. “Bucky, I have to be careful here. I wasn’t raised in Crow Hollow. In spite of Maris, I’m still seen as an outsider. And I’m okay with that because frankly, most of you people are certifiably nuts. I’m not supposed to say that, but it’s just me and you here. And you know Wilson and I have had our troubles. He still blames me for not catching Tonya’s cancer in time, and—”
“Doc?” Bucky asked. “Just tell me.”
“Fine.” Danny sat on the edge of the desk and folded his hands. “I don’t think there’s anything in the world wrong with the girls I’ve seen so far this morning. Just like I don’t think anything’s wrong with Naomi, Scarlett, or Cordelia.”
Bucky blinked twice, like the doctor’s words had smacked him. The more he looked to think on it, the angrier he got. Wasn’t right, what Danny had said. Wasn’t right everybody knows what your kids did. What happened had been the witch’s fault, Alvaretta’s alone.
“Now I don’t mean there’s nothing emotionally wrong, Bucky. There certainly is.” Doc shut his eyes, whispered, “Scarlett’s poor arms.” Then, louder and more to Bucky, “But physically? I simply don’t see it.”
“What about Scarlett’s arms?”
“Nothing. Look, all I’m trying to say is this can’t be what everybody thinks it is. I don’t doubt those kids stumbled across Alvaretta. I’m even willing to say they followed something they thought to be footprints to her cabin. But a curse? That stretches things beyond rationality, don’t you think?”
“No,” Bucky said. “I don’t think it does. It’s like you said, Doc. You didn’t come up here. In the Holler we know there’s more to the world than what you can find in books.”
And that was true. But I’ll say this too: Bucky also knew if Danny was right, it meant Alvaretta might not have a grip on them girls at all and Cordelia could be fixed. Come down to it, Bucky was smart enough to take crazy over cursed any day.
He asked, “If it ain’t a curse, Danny, what is it?”
“My guess? A delusion. Not a mass one, at least not yet. It’s been known to happen. Happened in New York State a few years ago. And for reasons unclear, young women seem most susceptible.”
“Alvaretta Graves ain’t no delusion,” Bucky said, “and neither is what she can do. Now I appreciate all you’ve done for Cordelia and the others, Danny, and I thank you for taking care of all them sick folk waiting outside, so I’m going to give you a nickel’s worth of free advice: You best keep your opinions quiet. It gets out this is what you think’s happening, nothing good will come of it.”
“But Bucky—”
“Nothing good. I mean it. I know these people, Danny. You say something like that, it’ll sound more like witchcraft than anything Alvaretta can say. And speaking of which, I got to ask you something. Maris said all them out there know what Cordy and her friends did Sunday morning. You tell them?”
&nb
sp; “No.”
“You need to tell me the truth, Doc,” Bucky said.
“I swear, Constable. Wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?”
“I did.”
Bucky turned in his chair to see Raleigh Jennings coming through the door like he’d been listening on the other side the whole time. His jaw was set and his chest puffed out.
Bucky stood up and said, “You tell me that ain’t right, Raleigh.”
“Something in the water, Buck? That what all y’all decided?” Raleigh came on into the office.
Maris tried shooing away the few who’d tried following Raleigh in, first with kindness and then with harsh words.
“Those are lies. Wilson shoulda been straight with me. I’m on the dad-blamed council.”
“Wilson’s trying to protect the town,” Bucky said.
“Wilson’s trying to protect his own.”
Danny put himself between the two men, trying to get things calm.
Bucky would have none of it. “Who told you, Raleigh? Who told you it was the witch?”
“Was on the prayer chain, if you got to know. I was the first person the Reverend called. He trusts me, not like you. Preacher told me everything.”
“And you told everybody else.”
Raleigh sighed and spread his arms wide, like he was surrendering. “It’s a prayer chain, Bucky. That’s how it works.”
Doc shook his head. “So now everybody in town knows Scarlett and her friends were up at the mines and had a run-in with Alvaretta Graves? That some . . . demon . . . cursed them and the town both? And now everybody’s girl is coming down sick and everybody in Crow Holler is blaming them, and you’re okay with that because it was a prayer chain? They ain’t safe now, Raleigh.”
“The girls.” Bucky looked at the doctor first, then Raleigh. “They’re headed this way. They’re coming home from the hospital.”
He fumbled for his phone and flipped it open. You ever pushed the buttons on one a them things? Tiny, especially for a big man who’s just realized his wife and daughter might be driving into danger. Bucky hit a 2 when it should’ve been a 3, a 4 and a 5 instead of just the 5, cussing as he did. Danny slid the phone off his desk over and dialed the number himself, handing Bucky the receiver.
