“And you are a natural—I’ve already told you that—anybody can see that.”
“I don’t know about that,” she says, waving off the compliment as though it were a fly buzzing around her. “All I know is, I never wanted the job. I sort of took it on by default.” Pause, parsing her words. “Just between you and me, there’s nobody around here that’s exactly leadership potential—all good people, believe me, but no real leaders in the bunch. And to be honest, I would rather be living a simpler life.” Pause. “I know the possibility of leading a ‘normal’ life is probably out of the question.” Another pause. “But I could envision myself having a family.”
The preacher’s voice softens as he says, “I notice you spend a lot of quality time with that fella Calvin and his little brood.”
She grins. “Guilty as charged.”
“You’re good with them kids, I’ll tell you that. And that fella is a good Christian man.”
“Thank you, I appreciate that.”
“Okay, so … what can I do to help?”
She smiles and takes a deep breath. “You can help me by becoming the leader of this community.”
SEVENTEEN
That night, much heated discussion follows Lilly’s proposal, and Lilly learns that Jeremiah is very hesitant to take on such an important role. He’s skeptical that the original inhabitants of Woodbury would accept him—an outsider who’s been there only a week—as their official leader. Nor is he certain it would sit well with his flock. They have grown very possessive of him. Lilly is relentless, though, and talks him into a compromise: coleadership. Jeremiah reluctantly agrees, and they shake hands on it.
The decision is all very hush-hush and unofficial at this point, but Lilly feels as though the weight of the universe has been lifted from her shoulders.
The next few days, she walks on air as she supervises the planting of watermelon and cantaloupe seeds on the north side of the arena, helps clean the last of the bloodstains and shackle anchors from the service bays beneath the racetrack, and tills the soil on the east side of the infield for a border of flowers. The flowers are Lilly’s idea—some folks are jokingly suggesting lilies—but some of the crankier folks in town think it’s a waste of time. Why spend one minute of your time on decorative, nonessential, frivolous things such as flowers? People in this town are in a life-and-death situation. They need to spend every waking moment fortifying the walls, gathering provisions, working on being self-sustainable, and just generally improving their odds of survival. Of course, no one can argue with this logic. Lilly knows it. Jeremiah knows it. Everybody knows it. But Lilly still yearns to have flowers in Woodbury.
The idea begins to obsess her. The memory of her father’s rosebushes looms large in her imagination and in her dreams. Everett Caul used to tend to his prize-winning flower garden with monastic attention, his English roses that bordered their picket fence the pride of Marietta. Plus, Lilly believes that she can convince the others that a flower bed is not completely lacking in purpose. She argues futilely that the flowers will attract bees, which will in turn aid the pollination of the other crops.
She talks to the Dupree kids about it, and they offer to help her plant them in secret at night after everybody has gone to sleep. The children instantly get the whole “flower thing” (which is now the phrase everybody is using for the controversy). Children accept things that adults have had leached out of them by the fast, brutal currents of life. But Lilly doesn’t want to go against the tide of opinion among the others, especially during such a delicate process of what she has come to think of as peaceful regime change.
The days continue to pass without incident or walker attack. The migratory pattern of the superherd has shifted directions, and the bulk of the walkers in the immediate area now have seemingly drifted to the north, perhaps drawn by the light and fires and noise still seething in the back alleys of Atlanta. Or perhaps it’s all desperately random. People are still puzzling over the movements of the undead, the innate behavior patterns, and the impossibility of predicting what they’ll do next. In her private thoughts, Lilly believes that they could return at any moment, a thousand times stronger than before, as devastating as an earthquake or tornado. All the more reason to live. Breathe the air. Love each other. Enjoy life as much as possible. And please, please, please—someday, somehow, God willing—stop and smell the flowers.
Over the next week, Lilly gets even closer to Calvin and his kids. She reads fairy tales and children’s stories—sometimes from memory, sometimes from dog-eared books that Bob had long ago scavenged from the library. She teaches Tommy how to load, fire, and care for a pistol. They practice down by the train yard—the place where the Governor once relentlessly trained himself to shoot with one functional eye—and Tommy develops a mad crush on Lilly, the first real crush of his adolescence. Calvin finds all this bonding wonderful, and little by little he begins to regret some of the things he said to Lilly the morning after they hooked up in the lonely corridor of the courthouse. It is very possible that Calvin Dupree is slowly, steadily, inexorably falling in love with Lilly Caul.
Lilly refrains from immediately jumping back into bed with him. She takes it slowly, treats him with respect, acts platonically around the kids, and generally denies the simmering sexual tension returning with a vengeance between the two. A few times they find themselves alone, at night, on the second floor of the courthouse, the kids fast asleep behind latched doors, and the drone of night crickets roaring outside the boarded windows, when they fall into each other’s arms and kiss like there’s no tomorrow, but Lilly keeps her clothes on. She’s not ready yet. She won’t give herself over to him completely until it’s time, which will be soon. She might as well face it: She wants to be the mother of his children.
By the end of that week, the church group has been a part of the community for almost a month, and Bob has been seen only a handful of times. The old army medic has been hunkering in the tunnels, alone, living like a monk, working on the ventilation and power, mapping all the myriad tributaries, reinforcing some of the load-bearing timbers, and basically stewing about the growing role Jeremiah is playing in the community. Lilly has decided to essentially leave him alone. She believes he’ll come around soon enough, and it’s best to let him soften on his own accord. But as Lilly will soon discover, Bob has been doing more than just stewing. He’s been spending a good chunk of his time trying to find out what the preacher is hiding in those enormous black duffel bags that are currently stowed under his bed in his apartment at the end of Main Street.
For some reason, which even Bob would be hard-pressed to explain, he is certain those duffel bag hold the key to Jeremiah’s true agenda.
* * *
High summer officially arrives the following Saturday, the crushing heat and humidity coming up from the Gulf like an invading army. By the afternoon, the asphalt two-lanes bordering town turn to sizzling skillets, and the hickory groves south of the railroad cook in the blazing ashen sun, their cinnamon musk perfuming the dense air of the forest like the sachets of moldy drawers.
Woodbury bakes in the heat until people start coming out of their stifling apartments and bungalows to at least breathe some fresh air. No one has the luxury of operational air-conditioning—the only A/C unit that’s still working off generators is a window unit in the back of the warehouse on Dogwood Lane where all the perishables are stored—so the best place to be at the moment is the town square under the generous shade provided by two-hundred-year-old live oaks, which spread their misshapen, aged arms across that single square block of seared crabgrass.
By dinnertime, practically the entire population of Woodbury has gathered under those oaks. Some folks have blankets spread out on the grass. Three of the church ladies—Colby, Rose, and Cailinn—have butchered a couple rabbits and arrive at the square with a long cookie sheet laden with deep-fried rabbit made on a campfire with recycled corn oil. Two of the younger church girls, Mary Jean and Noelle, have made extremely strong p
unch from canned fruit juice and Ben’s horrible homemade moonshine. Speed and Matthew have befriended the younger men of the church group—Stephen, Mark, and Reese—and the five of them break out the weed behind the courthouse building.
Everybody smells the sickly sweet odor of reefer wafting across the property, but now even the church folks seem to have become inured to the forbidden smell. Wade Pilcher, the middle-aged former Jacksonville police officer who has become the self-appointed sergeant at arms for the church group, actually finds it humorous. At one point, he goes around behind the building to play cop and scare the young men, and when they all scramble to hide the corncob pipes they’re using to smoke the pot, he lets out a guffaw, chastises them for not “bringing enough for the entire class,” and asks for a toke. At this point, the party kicks up a notch.
The sun begins to set around seven o’clock, and the genial light of dusk brings blessed relief from the blazing heat. By this point, the impromptu party has swung into overdrive. The combined population of Woodbury, now numbering forty-three souls, lets off the steam and stress of plague life in a spontaneous celebration. The Dupree children play red rover in the street with the half dozen other kids of Woodbury while Gloria breaks out her ukulele and starts strumming bluegrass tunes. Soon, David has joined her with his harmonica, and Reese has come over with a plastic bucket, which he starts drumming softly in time with the strumming.
Everybody gathers around as the sound of “Amazing Grace” swells up into the purple twilight. Harold Stauback, with the heartbreaking gospel voice, comes over and begins to sing. The kids quiet down, and the hushed air of dusk seems to hold and highlight the beauty of that single plaintive voice.
When Harold finishes, everybody applauds and whoops and hollers, and the Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz rises from his picnic blanket and ambles over to the makeshift bandstand and puts his arm around Harold.
“How about another hand for the pride of the Tallahassee Baptist Combined Choir,” Jeremiah booms, addressing the crowd in a joyful voice. “The former voice of WHKX Country, the great Harold Benjamin Stauback!”
Cheers ring out, and Harold takes a suave little bow and waves. “I thank y’all kindly,” he says when the cheers die down. He wipes his dapper mustache with a handkerchief and gives another bow toward Lilly, leaning against a nearby tree, carving a crab apple with a pocketknife, who gives him a huge grin. “And I know I speak for all of us when I say thank you to Miss Lilly Caul and the good and decent people of Woodbury.” The man’s eyes well up. “We knew the Good Lord would take us home sooner or later … but we never dreamed it would be … in a place as beautiful as this.”
Lilly glances across the square—not really registering what the man just said—and she sees the silhouette of a figure way off in the distance. An older man with greasy, pomaded hair and cords of neck wattle, dressed in a tattered wife-beater T-shirt worn gray with dust, he sits perched on a split-rail fence at the edge of a vacant lot. It’s hard to tell at this distance, but the man seems to perk up when he hears the preacher’s voice return to the breeze.
“If y’all would humor me for just a second,” Jeremiah says to the group, patting Stauback on the shoulder as the singer sits back down on a stump with the musicians. “I’d like to say a few words.” He grins. “This should come as no surprise to my people, who are used to me spoutin’ off about everything from rainbows to the Internal Revenue Service.” He pauses to let the chuckles ripple through the crowd. His smile goes away. “Just want to say a few brief words about flowers.” He looks at Lilly and gives her a nod. “Now one might make a case that flowers don’t serve much purpose in this old world other than for first dates and anniversaries. Maybe once in a while when you been stupid and you want to apologize to your best gal. Or maybe you want to gussy up a table or a room. But certainly nothing practical … like food, water, shelter, self-defense … or any of the things that have come to mean survival in these last couple of years.”
He pauses and scans the crowd now, making eye contact with virtually everyone present other than Lilly, playing the silence in the manner of a master orator, a man born to preach. He smiles a tranquil, knowing smile.
“You ask me, though, it’s easy to forget the purpose of God’s gifts such as music, brotherhood, good food, a fine cigar, and a stiff bourbon once in a while. I’m here to tell you that these things, in some ways, they’re more important than food and water, more critical to us as fully formed children of God than oxygen and sunlight … because they are all about what it means to truly be alive.”
Distracted by the lone figure down the street, Lilly now turns her gaze back to Jeremiah. Something about his words, and the way he’s saying them, grabs her, holds her attention. She can see the preacher is tearing up.
“We were not put here to merely survive,” he is saying, wiping his eyes. “Jesus did not die for our sins so we could merely exist. That’s the thing, brothers and sisters. If all we do is survive … we have lost. If them things out there cause us to forget God’s simple gifts—the giggle of a child, a good book, the taste of maple syrup on a pancake on a Sunday morning—then we have lost our way, and we have lost the war. Them dead things have already beat us … because we have turned our back on who we are.”
He pauses again, pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, and wipes his face, which is glistening now with sweat and tears tracking down his cheeks.
His voice crumbles slightly as he goes on. “A tire swing over a lake, an old La-Z-Boy tilted back in front of a football game, holding hands with your sweetheart … y’all remember these things. We all do.” He pauses, and Lilly hears others fighting tears, a few throats clearing, some sniffling going on, and it makes her own eyes burn. “Yep, them are just flower seeds that Lilly Caul wants to plant. Won’t feed anybody, heal anybody’s wounds, slake anybody’s thirst … but I submit to y’all, brothers and sisters, them flowers—like a runway at night with lights on for the planes—them flowers are a message to God, can be seen from heaven.” He pauses to gather his breath and work through his tears. Lilly can hardly move or breathe; her skin tingles at the power of this man’s voice. “Them flowers are telling God and the devil and everybody in between … we remember … we still remember … and we will never forget … what it is to be human.”
Some of the older men and women are overcome with emotion, their thick weeping sounds carrying up into the treetops on the warm, dusky, pine-scented breeze. It’s almost dark now, and the purple light seems to have put an exclamation point on the preacher’s words. He bows his head and murmurs, “One more thing I want to say, brothers and sisters.” He takes a deep breath. “Lilly has kindly asked me to help out with the leadership duties here in Woodbury.” Pause. He looks up. Tears on his face. Complete, utter, naked humility. “With all y’all giving your blessings … it would be my honor to stand alongside this good-hearted, decent, brave woman.” He looks at Lilly. “Thank you, partner.”
A tear tracks down Lilly’s face and she wipes it with a smile.
The preacher turns to the little impromptu band. “Y’all know ‘The Old Rugged Cross’?”
Gloria grins at him through the tinted brim of her visor. “Hum a few bars, Preach—we’ll figure it out.”
In a high lonesome voice that’s surprisingly delicate and beautiful, Jeremiah starts crooning the same song that Bob Stookey once sang softly to the corpse of a little girl named Penny, the same words now coming out of the handsome minister in a clear, warm, honey-flavored warble: “In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine, a wondrous beauty I see, for ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died, to pardon and sanctify me.”
Soon some of the others, mostly the older folks, find their voices and sing along. All of which mesmerizes Lilly right up to the moment she notices in her peripheral vision the shadowy figure in the distance push himself off the fence, turn, and march disgustedly away into the night.
“Wait!” Lilly turns and hurries after the figure. “Bob, wait
up!”
It takes her a minute to charge across the square, cross the street, and circumnavigate the northeast corner of the vacant lot. She finally catches up with the older man near the barricade.
“Bob, stop! Listen to me!” She reaches out for his arm and pulls him to a halt. “What’s wrong with you? What’s your problem?”
He turns and scowls at her, the light of a distant torch flickering off his deeply lined face. “Partners? Are you fucking out of your mind?”
“What is your thing with this guy, Bob? He’s a good man, anybody can see that.”
“This guy is bad news, Lilly, and you’ve swallowed his bullshit hook, line, and sinker!” Bob turns and storms away with fists clenched.
“Bob, wait. Hold on.” Lilly goes after him, gently tugging on his arm. “Talk to me. Come on. This isn’t like you to withdraw, acting all paranoid and shit. Come on, Bob. It’s me. What’s the deal?”
The old medic takes deep breaths as though tamping down his temper. In the distance, voices rise on the wind, the old hymn reverberating in the trees. Bob finally lets out a sigh and says, “Let’s go somewhere we can talk in private.”
EIGHTEEN
Inside Bob Stookey’s apartment on Dogwood Lane, amid the peach crates full of empty bottles and behind the hastily draped windows, Bob drops reams of old yellowed documents and publications on a table, making a loud thud, which makes Lilly jerk with a start.
“That little library I took you to last month, the one on Pecan Street,” Bob says, staring at the stack of newsprint, Xerox copies, and dog-eared magazines. “It’s one of them throwbacks. Dewey decimal system, card files, microfilm … remember microfilm?”
“What’s the point of all this, Bob?” Lilly stands near the front door with her arms crossed across her chest. She can see an old magazine at the top of the pile called the Tallahassian—presumably the slick, breezy, gossipy mag that once ostensibly promoted the Florida capital.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 21
