"I'll come up after supper and check on you," Katy said. "Or you can come down if you feel up to it."
Jett turned to face the window, hugging Captain Boo tightly. "I'll be here. Unless he comes to get me again."
"Honey."
"Never mind."
Katy rose from the bed. If she had the guts, she would tell her daughter about the mysterious figure she'd seen in the kitchen, the wispy form that had vanished in the pantry. But Katy wasn't ready to admit that the vision was real. No footsteps had sounded on the stairs when she was home alone, and the sudden scent of lilacs hadn't drifted across the kitchen whenever she performed a domestic task. This was an old house, that was all, settling wood and seeped-in aromas. Maybe she'd leave her own mark for the next generation: blackened cabbage and funky salmon.
"If it really was a man, Gordon will probably know him," Katy said, not quite believing her own words. "He'll know what to do."
Sure, Mom." Jett didn't believe her at all. "love you."
"Love you too." Sounded like she almost meant it.
Katy went downstairs into the kitchen, where she scraped the cabbage into the garbage. Perhaps she should dump the mess outside, but she wanted to get something on me table before Gordon showed up. She rummaged in the fridge, then with a sigh retreated to the safety of the freezer and a microwave TV dinner. Gordon's first wife, Rebecca, had never used a microwave, and Katy suspected the one she brought from her Charlotte apartment was the first to ever emit radiation in this house. Perhaps this meal was an affront to the generations of Smiths who had gone before.
"Get used to it," Katy said.
Something crashed in the pantry.
"Wonderful." She punched up the proper cook time on the keypad of the microwave. She couldn't handle cabbage but she was magic with instant meals.
With the microwave whirring behind her, she went to the pantry and pulled back the curtain. The aroma of lilacs was so strong it was like a slap in the face. Rows and rows of Mason jars lined the shelves, containing raspberry preserves, chow chow, sauerkraut, and a dozen other goods all expertly canned by Gordon's first wife. Enough to last a nuclear winter.
On the floor, juice leaking from shards of curved and gleaming glass, was a jar of pickles. Broken like the spaghetti sauce. As Katy knelt to pick up the largest pieces, she felt the curtain stir behind her, as if someone was through with business in the pantry and had chores elsewhere.
Jett listened to Mom banging around in the kitchen. She tried to muster a little sympathy, because Mom was trying to be some kind of trophy wife and didn't have the sense to recognize it just wasn't in her blood. Mom had just been plain uncool lately, a slave to the kitchen, fussing over the house, keeping dirty laundry off the floor. All to please Gordon, a man who wouldn't notice his slippers were on fire unless somebody turned a hose on him.
She tugged her Walkman from the lower shelf of her bedside table. She almost wished she had a joint. That would go over well with the Cure whispering through the headphones, Robert Smith going on about how he couldn't find himself even when he was in love with someone happy and young. No wonder, he should ditch the "happy" part and find a real woman. Jett would gladly volunteer.
After all, Jett was a drug-addict loser who had finally gone so far over the edge she was imagining mystical encounters with giant scarecrow men. If she had been stoned, she could have laughed it off. But she had promised Mom that drugs were a thing of the past, a habit left in Charlotte, and she was determined to keep the promise. If Mom could change, so could Jett. Though it looked like neither of them were changing for the better.
The front door closed downstairs, and over the guitar solo she heard Gordon's belly-deep professor's voice delivering his standard catch phrase. "Where are my favorite girls?"
Jett wormed deeper beneath the blankets. Gordon never entered her room after she was in bed thank goodness. That was one advantage of his being a religious guy. He had some weird Old Testament code that kept women in their place but also placed them on an altar. Mom had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. After Dad's neglect, any sort of attention was a cause of mindless joy for her. Not that Dad was a bad guy. He just had his own fucking shit to deal with, truckloads of it, and Jett wished she could call him right now. She needed somebody real to talk to, somebody who would understand about stupid scarecrow men.
But what would she tell him? She couldn't really remember. The whole thing in the barn seemed like a bad acid trip, and Jett knew about acid because she'd dropped it a second time at Melissa Sanderson's fourteenth birthday party. She'd spent the whole night hiding under Melissa's bed, talking to the dust bunnies. The weirdest thing was that the dust bunnies had talked back, and they even acted like bunnies, hopping around, frolicking, twitching their little whiskers. But that was a lifetime ago and a whole other person. That had been a stupid, skinny kid trying to fit in with the crowd.
Now she was trying to fit out of the crowd.
She cranked the Cure up to full volume and put the blanket over her head so Mom would think she was asleep. She wouldn't sleep. She didn't dare. Because, if she closed her eyes, she might see the tall, dark man with the sickle.
Somehow, morning came just the same.
Chapter Six
Ray Tester pressed the lever beneath the fuel control of his Massey Ferguson, raising the hydraulic arms at the Tear of the tractor. The arms held a bush hog, an oversize lawn mower attachment that hacked meadows into hay. Ray only had ten acres, the smallest of the parcels that had been divided among the family when Zachariah Tester died. Old Zack had been the preacher at Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church, a position now held by David Tester, Ray's oldest brother. David had gotten sixty acres in the will and Ray's attendance at the church had been spotty ever since, mostly funerals, weddings, and whenever some good home-baked pies were being served.
Ray surveyed the slain grass behind him. The signs called for dry weather, and if the rain held off for five days, Ray could get the hay rolled and stacked safely in the shed. He had a dozen head of cattle, but the way people were breeding goats up here, he might be better off culling his herd and paying his property tax bill by selling hay. He could understand the temptation to raise goats over cows: goats preferred to browse instead of graze, so you could turn them loose in the woods and they did gangbusters. They didn't mind a steep slope, either.
On the downside, and Ray had learned there was always a downside when it came to farming, goat meat was like a gamier version of venison and you'd never find it served up at McDonald's. Some of the organic farmers that had settled in Solom over the last decade had taken to milking goats. A nanny raised holy hell if you didn't tug her teats twice a day, the yield wasn't all that hot, and unless you were squeezing the milk into cheese, you had to hustle it off to market in Asheville or Charlotte. Both of those cities were full of queers and Asheville in particular was known to harbor witches, so as far as Ray was concerned the organic hippies could keep that little business.
Ray wiped the sweat from his bald head. A Cadillac passed on the road white as a virgin, with tinted windows and tires wide enough to roll out pizza dough. Damned tourist. Ray thought about flipping a finger, but Sarah down at the general store had lectured him on how outside money was good stuff. Yankees with summer homes paid the county plenty in taxes but didn't require many services, since they were only down here two or three months a year. Still, a Yankee was a fucking Yankee, and the invasion that had started in the War Between the States with General Bill Stoneman and finished up with Sherman had never really ended just changed tactics. Instead of cavalry and carpetbaggers, New York sent its developers and architects and their scrawny, pale wives.
But the driver of that heavy-assed hunk of steel was probably spending money down at Sarah's, and she was as sweet as sugarcane, so Ray lifted his hand in a halfhearted wave. Tourists liked that sort of thing, the farmer in his field a simple picture hearkening back to a simpler time. Wasn't nothing simple about it. You couldn't bart
er for what you needed anymore, and the government had gotten bigger every year, despite the Republican takeover of the South. Ray could sell down at the farmers' market in Boone and pocket some tax-free income, but he also had to be on the Agricultural Extension Office books so he could get his handout when the government decided to subsidize some crop or another.
The Cadillac disappeared around the curve and Ray turned the tractor for another pass. He lowered the bush hog and the thick blade cut into the clover, dandelion, rye, and sour grass. The green scent filled his nostrils. A horsefly landed on the back of his neck and he swiped at it. The fly lifted and settled again just above his ear. Ray slapped again, twisting his neck, so he wasn't watching as his tractor hit a hump, causing the front tires to bounce. Ray's left foot reached for the clutch but the back tires had already rolled over the same hump. The bush hog blade made a whining noise, and Ray looked back to see a stream of dark liquid spew from beneath the protective metal shield.
"Shit fire," he said, disengaging the tractor's transmission and throwing the PTO into neutral, stopping the blade. He set the hand brake and got down from the seat. Sometimes you hit a nest of rabbits in a hayfield. Once, Ray had accidentally chopped up a fawn. If a doe left her fawn, the fawn would remain at that spot until the mother came back, no matter what, even if a giant, smoke-spitting mountain of steel was heading for it. But this was no bunny and no fawn.
Four goats, their heads gone, their carcasses ripped with red gashes.
Somebody had slaughtered them and tossed their bodies into the knee-high grass. Somebody who wasn't interested in goat burger or rank cheese.
Ray killed the Massey Ferguson's engine and leaned against a rear tire, watching the flies swarm around their decaying feast. The first buzzard appeared in the sky, its black wings buffeted by the high September wind.
Hippies. Had to be. Or Yankees, maybe. Who else would kill a damned goat for no good reason? Though Ray saw no use in the stubborn critters, he wouldn't kill them on purpose. He was raised to kill only for food, anyway.
This was the work of somebody with no respect for the mountains, for the ways of the farm, for life. A person who pulled something like this didn't belong in the valley. Solom had always taken care of itself, even if outsiders had started buying up the land. And Ray was sure that, one way or another, Solom would take care of whatever disrespectful trash had done this messy deed.
Maters.
Those blessed maters were going to be the death of her.
Betsy Ward had canned, stewed frozen, and dried about thirty pounds of those red, ugly things. The blight had hit hard because of the wet summer, and the first frosts had killed the plants, but her husband, Arvel, had brought in a double armload just before the big autumn die-off. Now tomatoes sat in rows across the windowsill, along the counter, and on the pantry shelves, turning from green to pink to full sinful red, with the occasional leaking black spot. The thing about tomatoes was that no bug or cutworm would attack them. The plants were as poison as belladonna, and bugs were smart enough to know that maters would kill you. But people were a lot dumber than bugs.
Betsy wiped the sweat away with a dirty towel. She had been born in Solom, and had even gone off the mountain for a year to attend community college. She'd wanted to be a typist then, maybe get on with Westridge University and draw vacation and retirement. But Arvel had come along with his pickup and Doc Watson tapes and rusty mufflers and he'd seemed like the Truth for a nineteen-year-old mountain girl, and then one night he forgot the rubber and nine months later they were married and the baby came out with the cord wrapped around its neck and they had tried a few times after that, but now all they had was a long piece of property and a garden and so many tomatoes that Betsy wanted to grab Arvel's shotgun and blow them all into puree.
She looked out the window and saw Gordon Smith's new wife checking the mailbox. The woman had that big-city, washed-out look, as if she couldn't wander into daylight without a full plate of makeup. Still, she seemed harmless enough, and not as standoffish as the other outsiders who had flooded the valley since Betsy's knee-high days. And Betsy was sick to death of her kitchen, anyway. She flicked the seeds from her fingers and headed for the door, determined to greet her new neighbor.
Four mailboxes stood at the mouth of the gravel drive. Arvel's place was the closest to the highway, followed by Gordon's, then by a fellow Betsy had never met, though she'd peeked in his mailbox once and learned that his name was Alex Eakins. A young woman drove by to visit him about once a week or so, probably up to fornication and other sins.
"Howdy," Betsy called from the porch.
The redhead looked up from the box where she had been thumbing through a stack of envelopes. Her eyes were bloodshot. Betsy wondered if she was a drinker, then decided a God-fearing man like Gordon would never stand for the stuff in his house. Even if she was kind of good-looking, in an off-the-mountain kind of way. Her ankles were way too skinny and would probably snap plumb in half if she ever had to hitch a mule to a plow and cut a straight furrow. Still, she looked a little tough, like a piece of rawhide that had been licked and stuck out in the sun. And she'd walked the quarter mile to the mailbox instead of jumping in a car.
"Hi, Mrs. Ward," the redhead said. "Gordon told me about the tomatoes."
Betsy wondered just what Gordon had told, because mere wasn't a lot to tell. She'd known Gordon since he was dragging stained diapers across the floor of the Smith house. Sure, he'd gone off and gotten educated, but he was still the same little boy who'd once pegged her cat with a rotten apple. Plus he had the tainted blood of all the Solom Smiths. "How you liking Solom so far?"
"I like it here. A little different from what I'm used to, though."
Betsy wasn't so sure the redhead meant that first part, since the corners of her mouth were turned down and her eyes twitched like she hadn't got a wink of sleep. "How did your garden do this year?"
"Well, Gordon keeps up with that," the redhead said, fanning herself with the envelopes. "We had some cruciform vegetables, cabbage, broccoli, some corn. Gordon said I should take up canning."
Betsy wanted to ask about the Smith tomatoes, because tomatoes were how you judged a mountain garden. Any two-bit, chicken-stealing farmer could grow a cabbage. But if you could fight off the blight, you either knew what you were doing or your garden had been plain blessed by the Lord. But this skinny thing had come in during late summer and wouldn't know a thing about blight.
And probably didn't know a thing about Gordon's ancestor the Circuit Rider.
Betsy couldn't say whether that was a good or a bad thing. Ignorance was bliss, they said, but stupidity got you killed.
"Where you from?" Betsy asked. The new woman didn't seem Yankee, or of that species from Florida that had lately become the ruin of the valley.
"I was born in Atlanta, but I settled in Charlotte."
"Charlotte, huh? I seen about that on the news." Betsy was about to bring up all the niggers that shot each other down there. But even with the Confederate battle flags that flew up and down the highway near the tabernacle, she didn't think "nigger" was a Christian term. Besides, those Rebel flags usually flew just beneath the Stars and Stripes, so she reckoned that Lincoln's law was probably just a mite superior, though of course far short of the Lord's own.
Arvel's border collie, Digger, had dragged itself from under the shade of the porch and stood by the steps, giving a bark to show he'd been on duty all along.
"It's quite a change," the redhead said. She turned her face to the sun and breathed deeply. "All these mountains and fresh air. It's a little strange at night to fall asleep without lights burning everywhere."
"Oh, we got lights," Betsy said. "God's lights. Them little specks in the sky."
The redhead stopped by Betsy's gate. Digger sniffed and growled.
"Hold back Digger," Betsy said. "It's neighbors."
"The constellations," the redhead said her face flushing a little. "You can see them all the way down to
the horizon. In my old neighborhood, you saw maybe four stars at night."
"What else you seen? That's a little strange, I mean?"
"Strange? Well, it's all new, of course. Gordon's family has such a rich history here."
History just means you lived too long, Betsy thought. Valley families have made their peace with the past. And with the Circuit Rider. The families that are still around, anyhow.
"How's Gordon doing?" she asked.
"He's working on a new book. About Appalachian foot-washing practices."
"If he spent half as much time in church as he did writing about it, he'd be in the Lord's bosom a hundred times over."
The redhead gave a smile, but it looked as if she were chewing glass behind it. "Gordon has a passion for Baptist religion."
"Not the right kind of passion."
"Sorry, Mrs. Ward. I respect his work, and so do a number of anthropologists and sociologists who study this region."
"He ain't dealt with the proper side of things." Digger barked beside her in punctuation.
"I'll share your opinions with him," the redhead said. "My name's Katy, by the way. Katy Logan."
"Logan? I thought you was married."
"We are. I kept my maiden name. Long story."
No story could be long enough if it defied the Old Testament creed that kept a woman subject to her husband. Why, if Betsy so much as opened her mouth in anger to Arvel, he would slap her across the cheek and send her to the floor. In the Free Will church, she kept her mouth shut except for the occasional hymn or moan of praise, and she sat to the left with the other wives and the children. It was important to know your place in God's scheme of things. First there was God, then the Circuit Rider, and then the husband.
Digger growled again, sensing Betsy's unease.
"That girl of yours," Betsy said. "Seen her waiting for the school bus. What's her name?"
"Jessica," the redhead said, avoiding the question that Betsy had really asked: Who was the evil child's father? Because we all know it ain't Gordon. With all that makeup, it's obvious the little tart came straight from fornicating with Satan. Or maybe a Solom billy goat, which amounts to the same thing.
The Farm Page 6
