A Land More Kind Than Home

by Wiley Cash

  Clem Barefield

  SIXTEEN

  ADELAIDE LYLE’S SKIN WAS THIN LIKE PAPER, AND HER veins were blue smears across the backs of her hands. I watched them roll over her knuckles where her fingers kneaded the chair against which her body leaned. It was Tuesday morning, two days after they’d brought that boy’s body out to her house on the night he died.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she asked me. “Something to eat?” Before I could even answer her, she turned her back to me and shuffled over toward the cupboard and started searching the shelves.

  “I’m fine not to eat,” I said, but she kept staring into the cupboard as if she couldn’t hear me. “I’m fine not to eat,” I said again, louder this time to make certain she heard me. She turned around and looked at me for a moment like I’d hurt her feelings somehow, like I’d denied her something by not eating whatever it was she might have been able to pull from that cupboard. I motioned toward the empty seat at the head of the table. “I just want to talk to you for a few minutes,” I said. “Just a few minutes. That’s all. Shouldn’t take too much longer than that.”

  She hesitated for a minute, and then she walked back to the table and pulled out a chair. After she had lowered herself into the chair she smoothed out the tablecloth and interlaced her fingers and left them resting there before her. Her brown eyes were bright and uncertain, and I watched tiny flecks of gold flash across them.

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about what happened to Christopher on Sunday evening,” I said.

  “I don’t know anything to tell you,” she said. “I wasn’t there. I was at home. They brought him here after it happened.”

  “After what happened?”

  “After he died, I reckon,” she said.

  “How did he die?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” she said. “Like I told you, I wasn’t there. All I know is what folks told me.”

  “What did Julie say about it?” I asked.

  “She said they were trying to heal him. That’s all she said.”

  “Where’s she at right now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But she ain’t here.”

  “How long has she been staying with you?”

  “Just for one night,” she said. “But she may be staying here a little while longer.”

  “Why isn’t she at home with her family?”

  “Because she says it ain’t safe there. She says Ben’s taken to drinking and blaming her for what’s happened.”

  “Why doesn’t she feel safe? Has he threatened to hurt her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’d have to ask her about it, but you saw for yourself what he did to those boys who came out from the church on Sunday night.”

  “I did,” I said. “But there’s a lot of men who would’ve done them the same way.”

  “Would you have?” she asked.

  “I can’t say that I would have,” I told her. “Maybe at one time, yes. But a young man’s got more fire in him. An old man like me tends to think about things a little more deeply.” She looked away, and I sat and stared at the side of her face. I knew she could feel my eyes on her. “Has anybody told you not to talk to me about this?”

  “Nobody tells me what to do,” she snapped. “Nobody ever has. I’ve been at that church since I was a young woman, and not once has anybody ever told me what to do.” I sat back in the chair and stared at her for a second, and then I looked away and noted the tidiness of her kitchen. The shiny utensils hanging over the stove. The clear glass above the sink through which the sunlight poured.

  “I know you’ve got a mind of your own,” I said. “And I know it led you to take the children out of that church. And because of that, I know there has to be some good reason for Christopher being in there on Sunday night,” I said. “I believe they might’ve told you what it was.”

  “Folks told me they were trying to heal him,” she said.

  “And how were they doing that,” I asked, “by smothering him to death?”

  “It was an accident,” she said. “And you well know it.”

  “Do you think he needed healing?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “But that’s not for me to say, and it’s not for you to judge either. You didn’t know that little boy. You don’t know what he went through with some of those kids picking on him. You don’t know what his family went through all these years.”

  “I know he’s dead,” I said. “And I know his daddy wasn’t there and his mama won’t stay put long enough for me to ask her about it. I know that, but it ain’t enough to make sense of.”

  “You can’t make sense of everything,” she said. “That ain’t the job of man.”

  “It’s my job to make the best sense I can, and I’m more than willing to leave the rest to Him, if that’s what you mean. But sometimes I need a little help. That’s why I came out here to talk to you.”

  “I wish I knew how to help you,” she said.

  I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “Has Carson Chambliss told you not to talk to me?”

  She stood up quick and pushed back her chair. It made an awful scraping sound as it slid over the hardwood. She walked to the sink and leaned her hips into the counter. Her back was to me, and I imagined her eyes flitting across the grass and scanning the yard while taking full measure of the way the tone of my voice had arched around my words.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I watched her shoulders drop. “I just want to be sure that folks know they can talk to me. I want them to feel safe because I need to find out what happened.”

  “I’d tell you if I knew,” she said, turning to face me. “I can promise you that. I may be an old woman, but nobody tells me what to think or how to do, especially Carson Chambliss.” She folded her arms across her chest, and I watched as she appeared to pull herself inward. Her brief anger softened into a sadness that spread out across her face. Her eyes grew wet.

  “I love those children,” she said. “All of them. I love every single one of them like they’re my own. And to lose one of them, especially Christopher…” Her voice trailed off.

  I sat and listened to her and watched her eyes fill with tears, but I was somewhere else, listening to my own voice over hers. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She’s an old woman and she’s never raised her own and she doesn’t know what it is to lose one. And she’s not a man and she doesn’t know what it is to watch a mother grieve. I stared straight ahead and watched as it all came back to me. The dappled snow on the rhododendron. The silence me and Owens suffered as we stood over Jeff’s body, smoke rising from his boots and catching in my nose and in my throat until I wanted to puke. I could tell her about dreams, I thought. About how at night I wake from white-hot sparks hissing from my son’s toes while the current holds him on the line. But those are dreams, and there ain’t no place for them in the daylight. Not now, anyway. Not here.

  I looked past my own memories, and I tried to picture Adelaide Lyle’s face twenty years younger and wet with tears. I figured my arms would grow heavy with her just as they’d grown heavy with Sheila, and that her sadness would work itself into the core of my being and leave a hollowed-out place that couldn’t ever be filled. I knew that real loss isn’t something you feel after watching a child once a week while his mama sings hymns. It takes a lifetime to build equity in loss. There ain’t nothing before that.

  “You talk to Pastor Chambliss yet?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said. “You’re the first person I came to. But I can tell you that I plan to visit him as soon as I find out where he lives.”

  “Well, I might can help you with that,” she said.

  “I’d appreciate it,” I said. “But will you tell me something else?”

  “Depends on what it is,” she said. “Depends on whether or not I know what it is you’re asking about.”

  “After going to that church for all these years,” I said, “and after spending all that time
with those folks, what was it that led you to take the children out of there?” It grew quiet inside the house, and I caught myself narrowing my eyes and turning my head like I was listening for something I might not be able to hear. “Was it Chambliss?” I asked. She looked at me, and then she nodded her head. “What was it exactly? I promise I’m not going to say anything to him. There’s no reason for him to know I’ve even been here.”

  I could tell that she was thinking about the promise I’d just made, and I knew she was wondering whether or not I could keep it. And apparently she decided that I could.

  “This ain’t the first time it’s happened,” she said.

  “What do you mean ‘this ain’t the first time’?” I asked.

  “This ain’t the first time somebody’s died from all that carrying on,” she said. “And as I sit here telling you this, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that I should’ve tried to keep them from taking Christopher into that church in the first place. I don’t know that I could’ve stopped them even if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t even try. And now, here we are.” And then she said a name I hadn’t thought about in years and years: Molly Jameson.

  SEVENTEEN

  IT TOOK ME TWO DAYS OF LOOKING AND ASKING AROUND, BUT ON Thursday evening I headed out to Little Pine Creek in the South Marshall Township, where Chambliss was renting an old farmhouse from a deacon named Phil Ponder. The two-lane road ran along the creek, and the land opened up as I headed down into the cove. You could tell that autumn was bearing down on us because the leaves on the trees atop the ridge were just starting to get notions of color. I drove past the scarred, rocky outcrops until I got low enough to follow the creek on my right. I took a little one-lane bridge across it and headed down a gravel road until I drove into a clearing where a little house and a barn sat way back off the road.

  There was an old, broken-down Buick sedan parked in the driveway and an even older-looking coonhound tied up on a chain in the front yard. He howled like the dickens when I got out of the car, and I stood there looking at him until he finished and tucked his tail and sat down on his haunches. After that I put on my hat and looked around the yard. Then I walked up on the porch and saw that the front door was flung wide open. I leaned my head inside the house. It was cool and dark.

  “Hello,” I said. I waited a second to see if anybody who may be in the house had anything to say. Right inside a set of stairs led up to the second floor. On my right was a sitting room where one chair had been pushed up under a little table. There were a few books scattered on the tabletop. Overhead a single bulb hung down from the ceiling. All I could see of the room on my left was an old cloth sofa with cushions that somebody had tried to keep together with duct tape. “Hello,” I said again. I couldn’t hear a thing except that old hound dog growling at me out there in the yard.

  “You’re trying to scare off the good guys, you old mutt,” I told him as I walked by on my way down the porch steps. He quit growling and looked at me hard and cocked his head like he might be trying to figure out what I was saying to him.

  I stood there in the yard and watched what was left of the sun fall through the red maples, and I looked up and saw the thunderheads off in the distance. The breeze picked up and stirred the bitternuts and the sweetgums down by the creek across the road. I turned up my nose and caught the reek of that black bank mud and it smelled good, clean and cold, and I thought about the weather coming on and the days growing shorter and shorter. Wouldn’t be long before I’d have us a fire going at night in the front room. Then the snow again.

  I walked to the side of the house and stood in front of the cruiser and looked out across the yard and considered the old barn for a minute. It was sun-scorched and just about bleached white and appeared to be leaning to one side as if it might tumble over into the high grass. I set off across the yard to have a look. I don’t hold with snooping because that’ll get you into trouble real fast in this line of work. But I can tell you it doesn’t ever hurt to take a good look around when you got the time. Seemed to me like time was about all I had right then.

  The barn didn’t have a door on it, and I walked up to it and stood just outside it and looked in at all that blackness. I could smell the damp earth of the dirt floor, and I watched the dust motes float up and drift in and out of the light. I stood there and listened to the wind pick up on the ridge behind the barn and tumble down toward me and roll out over the road toward the creek bed in front of the house. I thought I saw something move way back toward the far wall, and I squinted my eyes and took a step inside so they’d adjust to the dark.

  “Come on in, Sheriff,” a voice said. “I heard your car when you pulled up. Forgive me for not coming out to meet you.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I hate to be a snoop, but I was hoping you’d be out here.”

  “Well, here I am,” said Chambliss.

  My eyes had finally got adjusted, and I could see the outline of his body, and I could tell he had his back turned to me and his hands were moving like he was working on something. I could feel the wind coming through the cracks in the walls and there was a sound like dried leaves being rustled somewhere in the barn that I couldn’t see. He clicked on a little lamp on the table in front of him, and the edges of his body glowed. I wondered if he’d turned it off when he realized I was there.

  “I hate to interrupt you,” I said. “I just wanted to ask you some questions about what happened up at your church this past Sunday night. I just need to get some things cleared up, and then I’ll be out of your hair and on my way.”

  “What kind of questions do you have?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve just got a couple about that boy we had that funeral for yesterday evening.”

  He stopped working and stood there for a second just as still as he could be. Then I saw his body move and he turned to face me. The little lamplight behind him shone all around him. The wind picked up again and whistled through the walls and stirred what sounded like leaves somewhere against the wall of the barn.

  “I just realized there ain’t hardly no light in here,” he said. “It don’t bother me, but I’ll bet you can’t see a thing.”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “It ain’t like I’m looking for nothing anyway. Just talking.”

  “But it’s awfully dark,” he said again. “There’s a bulb right above you there on that middle beam. If you don’t mind to turn that bulb on, it would let us see each other a little better.”

  I looked up toward the beams running over my head and saw an exposed bulb, and I stepped forward and felt around in front of me until I found a little piece of string where it hung down. I gave it a tug, but the light didn’t come on. Chambliss clicked off the lamp on the table, and his voice seemed to rise from the darkness.

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “I think it’s got a little short in it. If you’ll reach up there and give the bulb a turn, then it’ll come right on.”

  I stood up on the toes of my boots and ran my hand along the beam until my fingers closed around the dusty bulb. I gave it half a turn and it came right on, and when I looked up at the beam again there was a snake coiled around it with its head reared back like it was ready to strike. My hand snapped back, and I hollered out and fell onto my back in the dirt.

  When I looked up, I saw Chambliss standing above me in the light from that bulb, and just over his shoulder I could see where a thick cord of rope with a pulley set to the end of it had been wound around the beam.

  “You all right, Sheriff?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said as I got to my feet and dusted myself off. “My mind was just playing tricks on me. That’s all. I just thought I saw something that wasn’t there.”

  I took my hat off and ran my fingers over my head and put it back on. I raised my head and took a good look at Chambliss. His flat-top haircut was streaked with little hints of gray and he was older than I’d remembered, but he looked to be strong, like a man who was used to doing hard work. H
e had on blue jeans and a spotless blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled down. His hands were covered in some kind of grease, and I figured he’d been working on something when I found him. I looked over his shoulder and saw that he’d been beneath the hood of an old Chevy. He rubbed at his nose with the back of his hand; the grease left a smear just above his lip.

  “What did you think you saw up there?” he asked, smiling.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  I dusted off the front of my pants and looked around the inside of the barn. It was slam full of rusted old farm implements: a deflated tractor tire with a bent wheel, a couple of broken-down engines hanging on chains from the rafters. There were tools of all sorts scattered all over the dirt. I turned my head to the right, and when I did I saw what must’ve been hundreds of molted snake skins tacked to one whole wall of the barn, and I realized that the sound I’d heard earlier was actually the wind whipping through the slats in the walls and rustling those skins. It was a sound like a dead cornfield being stirred in a breeze. Underneath those snake skins were stacked dozens of little crates fitted with handles and clasps. I quit dusting my pants and just stood there looking at them. Chambliss followed my gaze to the wall, and then he looked back at me. I heard him laugh to himself.

  “You’re not afraid of snakes, are you, Sheriff?”

  I looked back over at Chambliss. He was smiling again.