by Newman,James
Dan and I still speak, but only once or twice a year. In fact, it is his turn to call now. Has been for the last two or three months, but I have heard nothing out of him.
I’m not too worried about it, though. Dan will call. He always does.
Our mother died in the winter of ‘94. She was fifty-three years old. I knew it had been a long time coming. When it happened I was surprised only by the fact that she lasted as long as she did. The drinking, of course, was what killed her. It got worse than ever, after the truth came out about Sheriff Baker and the way he had betrayed our town. Mom stayed in a perpetual drunken stupor for the next three or four years, and I guess her liver finally couldn’t take any more. We watched her go downhill so fast, until she gave in and just slipped away.
She’s buried beside my father now, in the cemetery behind Trinity First Baptist.
Less than a hundred feet from the grandchild she never wanted.
****
As for me?
I left Midnight for a little while. As soon as I could, in fact. Three months after I graduated from Gerald R. Stokely High School, I wasted no time at all in packing my bags and—much to Mom’s chagrin—I went away to the University of North Carolina for four years with dreams of some day working in journalism.
As soon as I graduated from college, though, I came back.
Why?
Call it an epiphany, if you will. An awakening. At some point as I ventured out of childhood and into the vast, wide realm of manhood I realized it was not Midnight that had changed. It was not my hometown that had shown me so many dark things, so many evil ways of the world.
I loved Midnight. I always had.
One person had ruined that place for me. A man who had sworn to protect and serve the citizens of his community. A man who had betrayed all our trust.
He was the virus. He was responsible for tainting my hometown, for causing me to hate it for damn near a decade.
Midnight, I decided, was where I wanted to be. I would run from it no longer.
Shortly after my twenty-fifth birthday, following a campaign that was considered to be more one-sided by the citizens of Midnight than any they had ever seen, I was elected Sheriff of Polk County. The youngest sheriff, in fact, in our fair county’s history.
Sometimes I have a hard time believing it myself. But it’s true. I honestly cannot cite any single, specific reason why I chose to fill the shoes of the man I once hated with every fiber of my being. Perhaps I wished to assure the citizens of Polk County—even those who had not thought about what happened in years, or were too young to remember Burt Baker’s scandalous term in the first place—that such a thing could never happen again. That the respected position of their protector-of-the-peace had not been tarnished forever.
Perhaps I wanted to assure myself of that.
It seems to be working so far.
As for the Old Shack…six years ago I went back to that grove in the middle of the Snake River Woods, to that dreary little corner of the world I had once called my Secret Place. I went back not by choice, however. Not because I wanted to. I certainly did not go there to appease any burning desire for nostalgia or to bask in the warm recollections of boyhood wonder.
I revisited my Secret Place, for the first time in twenty years, because it was my job.
Seems a group of white trash entrepreneurs were running a part-time meth lab out there, using the Old Shack as a place to cook up their stash without any worry of ever being caught. They used the Well to hide their merchandise between visits to the Old Shack, keeping their Schedule II goods in small steel boxes they could raise and lower into the depths of the earth as needed upon long black cords with magnets on the end. Sure, it was clever, but practical ingenious is far from a valid cause for clemency. After staking the place out for several weeks, my deputy—a young man by the name of Roy Schifford, whose grandmother had been the meanest old crone ever to walk the aisles of the Midnight Public Library—busted the place and arrested six gentlemen who are now serving time in the very prison where Burt Baker resided until his death in ‘93.
Two weeks after they were convicted, with the help of a demolition company owned by a distant cousin, I had the Old Shack torn to the ground.
The Well, too. After it was destroyed it was filled in with gravel and several truckloads of thick red clay, to prevent anyone from stumbling into that deep black hole in the forest floor.
I used the mossy gray rocks that once formed the exterior walls of the Well to build my fiancée a fancy flowerbed.
It felt good, doing that. As if I have to tell you. Some might call it catharsis.
****
I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention Burner!
Yes, he’s still around, believe it or not. Six months ago I had my old blue bicycle fully restored over at Darnell’s Bike Shop on Tenth Street. It wasn’t cheap, but I didn’t mind. It was worth every penny just to see Burner back in all his glory.
I gave the new and improved Burner—or “Version 2.0,” as I like to call him—to my oldest son for his seventh birthday.
My, how the kid beamed. I do not know who was happier, little Calvin or me.
Then again, maybe I do.
****
I don’t think I ever want to leave Midnight, insane as it sounds.
Maybe one day I will. Because nothing ever stays the same. Things change. People change. My first wife, Charlene, is living proof of that.
We never know where the roads of life will take us. We just find out when we get there.
For now, despite everything that happened in Midnight when I was a boy, I believe I am exactly where I want to be.
I have come home. I am content.
Even if the midnight rain never seems to cease, even to this day.
Cemetery Dance Publications
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Epilogue
Cemetery Dance Publications
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