November Mourns

by Tom Piccirilli

  “You’re just what?”

  “Looking for the church,” he told her.

  “Why?”

  “I want to learn more about it.”

  It softened her face, and she said, “Not many strangers are interested in our ways. Who are you?”

  “Shad Jenkins.” As if his name held its own meaning and had nothing to do with him at all. “Were you waiting on someone?”

  “I was hoping to see him today.”

  “Who?”

  “Not you. I surely wasn’t expecting you. I don’t think, anyhow.”

  Shad couldn’t argue with that so he just stood there. She did the same. The seconds ticked off like the passing of ice ages. You could waste half your life standing around wishing that somebody else would make the first move.

  The princess of goblins held firm to her stoic pride, unafraid but expecting him to do something terrible. It got to him after a minute and he backed away and started to walk south again.

  “I’m Jerilyn Gabriel.”

  “Lucas Gabriel’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  He stepped to her and saw that her eyes were green with flecks of gold in them catching the light. She crumpled the remaining pages into a ball and threw them into the water, picked up a stick, and poked them down until they sank into the mud.

  Letters to an unrequited love? Diary entries containing the secrets of her tribe? Some words counted for more if you released them into the world, even if they went unread.

  “Can you show me the way to your, ah, settlement?” he asked. He didn’t know if the community even had a name. What did you call it? A community? A colony?

  “You from town?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hardly ever go there into the hollow.”

  “Why?”

  “They’d call me a witch.”

  “Would they? Why do you think that?”

  “We handle snakes. That scares a lot of townsfolk.”

  Shad couldn’t see it. There were enough granny women still sticking to the old ways that nobody in the hollow would give her any trouble. As he was discovering, the folks he’d known all his life were a superstitious lot that ran on fears they couldn’t even name. No one would bother her except the men at Dober’s Roadhouse catcalling from the alleyways.

  “Don’t it worry you none? That I might call a rain of rattlers down on you?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll just do so. Teach you a lesson for sneaking up on people.”

  She eased closer to him, studying his face. As if he might be someone she knew but didn’t fully recognize. She shifted to one side and checked his profile, reached out like she might ruffle his hair. He was hoping, but she didn’t. She was a girl of many half-completed movements.

  “What are you examining me for?” he asked.

  “Nothing, just considerin’.”

  “Okay. Considering what?”

  “You ain’t him, are you?” she said, and her voice was suffused with both hope and regret.

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then you’re not.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “You want to come for supper?”

  Ten minutes ago she’d looked at him like he’d escaped from a chain gang, and now he was being invited home to dinner. “Maybe your family wouldn’t take kindly to having another place set beside them. I just want to talk to some of your congregation for a few minutes.”

  “Come eat and talk with them all,” she said. “They look forward to sharing with strangers.”

  “Really? Why?” Shad asked, genuinely interested. “I thought you people stuck together because you didn’t want outsiders coming around and inconveniencing you.”

  “Nah, the hollow folk are always welcome. But hardly any come round.”

  “Hardly any?”

  “Some come to sit with my daddy.”

  He kept thinking of her father being the Goblin King with two handfuls of destruction.

  She led him downstream, over embankments that sloped to marshy areas that reminded him of the river bottoms, even though they were three or four thousand feet above the Chatalaha by now.

  The wind blew harsher, carrying with it leaves and moans through the boles. Jerilyn shivered and leaned over to take Shad’s hand. She tugged him closer, insistent but also obliging. Self-assured and sexy but somehow also critical, as if testing the structure of his fingers, reading his scars, appraising the bones. She used her thumb to gently rub across his knuckles, the same way Elfie used to do, like, Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.

  They walked in silence, listening to the complaints of the deepening forest. The sun spun down through the branches laced overhead, skewering the ground with golden spearlike shafts. The woods closed in here, briars knotting into a grove of thorn and thistle anchored by oak and drifting boughs of slash pine. The cedar below was matted and wet with dew and heavy November sap.

  Shad scanned the bark and didn’t see any buckshot or bullet holes nearby, but the trunks were scarred with thin chop marks. They probably used machetes to cut through the catclaw thickets.

  When they broke into a clearing, Shad heard wild giggling.

  “There,” Jerilyn said, pointing. “That’s where we live.”

  They had their children out gathering the snakes.

  SHE STARTED FORWARD IN A RUSH, AND THE TAWDRY color of the trees reared around her. Shad got his bearings and found himself stumbling into a bedlam of activity, as the brush rustled and parted with laughing kids and rattlers.

  Two diamondbacks slithered over his boots. He leaped back with a startled grunt and almost dropped over on his ass.

  What would have happened then? Would they have sprung for his face, latched on to his cheeks?

  “Goddamn,” he whispered. Revulsion nearly overpowered him. Two girls no more than ten years old bumped into his leg, looked up at him, and smiled. He had to fight the urge to run.

  So this was how they had fun up here past Jonah Ridge. Roundups.

  He watched the parents carrying their croker sacks, drinking beer, and encouraging their children. They cheered and gave advice, pointing out the snakes in the deep grasses. No one wore gloves. Several Plexiglas containers hung open, with their lids unlatched. Someone sang a hymn Shad didn’t recognize. Adults stood in small groups here and there holding crooked metal rods, pouring gasoline in small amounts and setting fires to drive the snakes from their holes.

  Pubescent boys leaped over the flames and dove into the undergrowth.

  Nobody showed the slightest bit of apprehension. Kids carried snakes back in their arms, thrown over their shoulders. Holding two or three in each hand. They were playing with the things.

  Once their sacks were full the folks emptied them into the containers.

  He knew the original intent of roundups was to rid certain areas of rattler overpopulation. Gather and destroy as many snakes as possible. In some states, dealers harvested the skins.

  An old-timer with a sunburned pate and a Mount Sinai voice ambled by, and said, “Hey there, how you today?”

  Shad couldn’t even bring himself to nod in acknowledgment. The guy used a metal rod to trap a diamondback against the earth, hook it up, and draw it closer. The snake opened wide and bared its dripping fangs as the old man stuffed it into his sack. The muscles in Shad’s jaw ached from clenching his teeth.

  He recognized most of the different species from books he’d read in the can. Seeing them all in one place surprised him. He didn’t think so many different species could live together in such a small area: garter, cottonmouth, ringneck, hognose, diamondback, indigo, and yellow rat snake.

  Jesus, they couldn’t all be indigenous to this patch of woods, could they? Were these church folks bringing them in and breeding them? Penning them up and letting them loose again for their children to chase.

  Could you train rattlers? Would they go only s
o far, then turn around and come on back home again?

  Clouds drifted over the sun. The threat of rain grew stronger. The wind rose, carrying the flames higher until smoke and the smell of burning scrub wafted into Shad’s face. Trees swooned and the heady clack of thick oak limbs battering together resounded through the clearing. The oncoming storm seemed to make the folks even more excited. Their Plexiglas bins were filling.

  Jerilyn reappeared. One last shaft of sun angled down toward her feet as she approached, then snuffed out as she reached him. Her bangs swept back and forth in the breeze, and he watched her bare shoulders and tried hard not to be entranced by the glimmer of raindrops on her skin. He couldn’t help it. The way the scene had been set, it appeared to have been directed especially for him. She very nearly managed to draw his attention away from the snakes boiling over in her path.

  So maybe some of the hollow folks would’ve called her a witch.

  “You ever see a roundup before?” she asked.

  “Christ, no.”

  “You said you wanted to learn about our church.”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I did say that.”

  Listening to the hisses coming from off to the left, the right, mothers calling their kids to them because they had to get out of the rain. They’d finish catching the rattlers tomorrow, if it was nice out.

  There was a different kind of friction working in the air now. A new energy coming toward him, a presence quickly homing in on him. He spun and lifted his hands in case he had to fight. Jerilyn’s face closed up. Her lips pressed together and the fine, soft chin scrunched into wrinkles of annoyance.

  “Mr. Shad Jenkins,” she said, “I’d like to introduce you to my sister, Rebi.”

  He watched the grasses part, and the storm was on him.

  You couldn’t look at her without a list of all the biblical seductresses flashing through your mind. She was perhaps a year or two younger than Jerilyn. Long dark hair framed by the gathered darkness, rain coming down on her and bearing through the bramble patches. An expression of insolence or petulance on that face. She was compact and had graceful curves that crowded her outfit until the seams wanted to split.

  She gripped a ringneck in each hand, casually holding them out before her. She struck a provocative pose, hip out, the snakes adding some indefinable wanton abandon. It was bestial in its own way. When she came at him again, it was with a slow, big-cat walk, predatory with a hint of violence.

  Doom didn’t always sneak up on you, sometimes it sashayed.

  “Hello,” he said.

  There was meat and jiggle to her. A light blue skirt sheathed her fine hip, and she wore a loose black top cinched at the waist by a thick belt. He should’ve spotted her from twenty yards off but he hadn’t until she was on top of him. Her breasts moved vigorously beneath her blouse. A dab of crimson touched the cheeks in her round face, the lips equally red. Her hair coiled and clung against the sides of her neck. A flicker in her black eyes made him think of Callie Anson for an instant.

  He hadn’t seen a woman—any woman—during the two years he was in the slam, and now they were coming out of the weeds to find him.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

  It took him a second to find his voice. “You too, Rebi.”

  Jerilyn’s eyes narrowed and he saw the anger move through her like an iron smoothing out creases. It had nothing to do with him. His presence served as a catalyst for some dispute that had started a long time ago.

  “You’re a little wide-eyed, Mr. Jenkins. Never handle snakes before?”

  “No.”

  “You a’scairt?”

  Everybody always asking him that, like they were waiting for him to fall apart. You say yes, and they have something to hang over you. If you say no, they shove the fucking thing right in your face. Better to sound like an urban hippie who’d never set foot in a field before.

  He said, “I know enough to respect them.”

  “Don’t you be worried none. If’n you get bit, we got plenty of that there antivenom serum.”

  Just the thing to set his mind at ease. There was something sly about her that he both liked and hated.

  “He won’t be bit, so long as you turn those ringnecks aside, Rebi,” Jerilyn told her. “You angered them some.”

  “Oh, these is just babies. They wouldn’t likely break the skin.”

  “Come on,” Jerilyn said. “It’s time for supper.”

  Rebi looked at Shad, let her tongue out to moisten her top lip. “You eatin’ with us?”

  “Yes, he is,” Jerilyn answered for him.

  “That’s fine then. Daddy’s gonna enjoy meetin’ him.”

  Rebi held the snakes up before him, opened her mouth wide, and brought the reptiles closer and closer and closer until all their tongues were flicking wildly together.

  It made him sick to his stomach, and hard.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THEY LED HIM BACK UP OVER THE EMBANKMENTS and down to a trail that ran through a tract of catclaw briar. The rain came down and brought a cold that somehow became despair. It reminded Shad of the evenings when he was a kid and he and Pa would walk out to his mother’s grave and blunder their way through prayers. Six or seven years old, sometimes Mags would come along and say the proper words for them.

  Rebi eventually let the two snakes she’d been carrying go free, and the girls began to walk faster. Rain cascaded off the slash pine, and oak branches snapped in the winds. The temperature dropped quickly until they could see their breath. Rebi began to laugh quietly.

  He heard the other snake handlers up ahead on the trail, the children still giggling and chattering excitedly, parents giving sharp commands to watch for stickers. Jerilyn pressed a hand to Shad’s elbow, helping to guide him over the rough path.

  When they broke from beneath the heavy brush, the trail sloped to a hamlet he hadn’t been expecting.

  The community proved to be much larger than Shad had imagined. He’d been thinking it might be like the shantytown quarter in Poverhoe City, but it was much more formalized than that. Lottie Sublett had been right. Houses and cabins sat close together, porches bunched up to form plank walkways.

  There was some money here in the settlement. But the men had done the work themselves and they hadn’t had the skills or craftsmanship to do an impeccable job. His father would’ve been appalled. Foundations had shifted and the walls inclined at bad angles. Rain would cause doors and window frames to stick or jam shut. They had sunk their own wells and septic tanks and the area had unnatural grades to it.

  Now folks returned to their homes carrying their containers of snakes, the kids asking questions about church services, men talking about their hunger.

  In the center of the small colony stood a two-story farmhouse with a wide veranda. It was much larger and better constructed than the surrounding buildings, erected on rocky, thorn-choked land that could never be properly farmed. It showed that these people either believed in miracles or had an insane amount of faith in themselves.

  Unlike the other homes, which looked to have been built within the last couple of years, the farmhouse had been around for decades.

  “That’s our place,” Jerilyn said. “It doubles as a communal center for the congregation.”

  “A church?”

  “We don’t really have a proper chapel,” Rebi told him, and when she spoke she turned and moved against him. He had a hard time listening even with her talking in his ear. “Just a big room in back of the house with seats.”

  “Is your father the preacher?”

  “I reckon you could say that, though anybody can give witness if they like. The rest of the congregation, well, they’re more than just neighbors. A lot of them are cousins, family now through marriage. More every year.”

  “Was your whole village out there this afternoon?”

  Jerilyn let out a smile at that, and said, “Mama and a couple of the other women stayed out of the roundup so they could prepare supp
er.”

  One question led to another. He was starting to grow annoyed by the inquiring tone of his own voice, but pressed on. “Is this considered a holiday for you? A holy day?”

  “Every month or so we do the snake hunt. No particular day, really, just whenever Daddy and the rest of them get in the mood for the celebration.”

  “And what do you do with them all? The snakes.”

  Rebi slid up into his face again. The girl had no idea what personal space might mean. Ferociously sexy as she was, it still got on your nerves. “Daddy does some preaching and everybody bears witness and they handle the rattlers during services. Afterward, we set ’em free, then round ’em up again.” She drew her hair aside and cocked her head so he could see. There were puncture scars along the edge of her throat.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Why the hell are they on your neck?”

  “’Cause I like to dance with snakes in my hair and draped over my shoulders, that’s why.”

  Glowering, Jerilyn pulled her sister roughly away. “It’s not like we let the snakes bite us on purpose. We’re not fools, and we don’t believe that God will protect us from the poison because our souls are pure. It’s just another way to pay tribute to the Lord. We’ve all built up a resistance over the years, so it’s not as dire as you might think. Like I said before, townsfolk would think that witchy.”

  Rebi’s blouse had been soaked through and when she moved beside him she gave it an extra nudge so he could feel the weight of her chest pressing in close and pay attention. He did. Her hair flowed across the left side of his face and Jerilyn’s flailed against the right.

  Still, you had to pretend that you weren’t aware when your life took on the pattern of a tale you’d heard before. How many guys in prison had talked about fucking two sisters back to back, back to forward, right to left, and the catfights that came afterward? The crews on C-Block would be drunk on pruno listening to how the cops would come in and bust up a brawl between two razor-wielding ladies. A rookie getting slashed in the face and screaming while he bled all over the place. The nightsticks and cuffs coming out, paramedics in the hallway, and the guy stoned and just lying there on the bed watching it all. The C-Block crews would laugh their asses off, and they never got tired of sister stories.