“You have trouble with those snake people?”
No reason to lie about it at this point. “Yes.”
“They might come after you.”
“No, they won’t.”
Doc was a little startled, and now the worry entered his face. “Did you . . . ?” Leaving a nice dramatic pause, like he was on a dinner theater stage practicing a scene out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? “Did you—”
“What?”
“Did you kill them all?”
“Stop talking crazy, Doc. Why didn’t you call Increase Wintel when you first saw me?”
An expression of shame contorted Doc’s features. He jutted his clown feet out and stared down at them. “From what I can gather, you went up Gospel Trail Road. If it had been my sister, I might’ve done the same. I had no answers for your father when I examined Megan’s body. Neither did the sheriff. That rankles me. I was raised here in the hollow same as you. I know about them hills.”
Doc stopped as if that explained everything. Shad frowned but let it slide because it served his own purpose. This is what the advance of science and medicine had come to in this county?
Maybe Doc was cutting him a break because he felt guilty for botching Megan’s cause of death. Or maybe he was just sick of the hollow and of Shad and of the ill babies he kept bringing into the world.
“Now that you’ve . . . finished your business with that road, I have to report this, Shad Jenkins.”
“I’m not quite finished yet, Doc.”
“Son—”
When they wouldn’t listen to you when you were on your back, you reminded them of when they’d been in the same spot. “Do you remember when I’d come across you out cold on the lower banks with your feet in the water? I’d stop and pick you up and drive you home before you floated off. Your wife always tried to pay me forty dollars. I’m not sure how she arrived at that price.”
“It’s all the money she ever had at one time,” Doc said. “I kept her on a strict allowance ’cause she’d go all over the damn county looking for garage sales and bring home the most ugly piece of useless furniture you’ve ever seen. Wicker. All this goddamn wicker. Folks who make wicker seats are inhuman and ought to be torched at the stake.”
Doc had some issues. “Can’t say I blame you then.”
“You’re putting me in a bind.”
“Maybe three days ago you were in a bind. Now it’s more or less an afterthought.”
Doc considered that. “All right, I won’t go to the police. I’ll also deny that I was ever here. I got enough trouble in my life.”
“We all do. Thanks.”
“You mind telling me why you won’t go? That’s a bad rifle wound. You’ve got internal injuries. Even if you do heal up you’ll be bedridden for months. You’re always going to have a limp.”
“I’ve passed through the fire, Doc. God doesn’t want me. If he did, he would’ve taken me.”
“You’re raving.”
“You think so?”
Doc Bollar stepped back, his shoulders slouched, defeated long before he ever came to this house. In a confessional whisper, he asked, “What happened up there in those briar woods, Shad Jenkins?”
Jerilyn dead. Rebi dead.
Hart and Howell Wegg dead, one by Shad’s own hand.
How did you frame the overwhelming nature of it all, the crimes of his search? The enormity of the chasm he had crossed from one side to the other?
He wet his lips and kept at it for another minute, trying to find the right words to explain himself, and looking just as foolish and discouraged as the old man. Some questions you could never answer aloud. He finally managed to say, “So tell me, how’s your bunions, Doc?”
TANDY MAE LUSK, MEGAN’S MOTHER, THE THIRD WIFE of Karl Jenkins, had always been a little bowlegged. But in the past twenty years she’d gained some weight and birthed so many babies that her knees were now perpetually bent.
She had to sort of swing her way into the room as if her pelvis was cracked or her legs had been broken in the past. Some of the ill children huddled around her, others trailing behind and hanging back in the dark hall.
Shad had driven past the Lusk farm on occasion, pulled over on Route 18 to stare over at the house, wondering what it would’ve been like to have Tandy Mae for a stepmother for longer than the couple of years she’d shared with Pa. If he would’ve wound up stronger or simply been derailed even faster. And how Megan would’ve fared through her times of need if she’d had her mother’s care always on hand.
There are sorrows that can gut you a millimeter at a time, for years without you knowing it, until you wake up one day emptied out and completely hollow with no idea of how it happened.
That’s the kind of expression Tandy Mae Lusk wore now. She sent the kids from the room to do chores. They hobbled and rolled and cantered off, wriggling and creeping in a chaos of half-finished bodies. She didn’t address any of them by name.
Only the pumpkin-headed boy stayed close. Just outside the doorway but occasionally peeking in. Shad raised his hand and waved. The kid flapped his fingers back. He only had four.
Tandy Mae’s face was as closed as a fist, stony but not exactly angry. She still had a certain youthful appearance to her, as if she hadn’t quite grown old naturally but instead had the decades imposed on her all at once. Maybe it’s how she felt too.
What did it to you? Bearing this many ill children for whatever reason, unable to stop? Shad could see Tandy Mae’s husband forcing her to stay pregnant year in and out, hoping for the one normal son to finally show up. A boy to play baseball with and teach how to drive a car. After this many kids what finally made him leave?
She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor as if expecting to be beaten. It gave Shad another view on what had gone on inside this house.
“Thank you for taking me in,” he said.
“I had no choice,” she told him with no hostility.
“You could’ve phoned the sheriff.”
“I think you would’ve killed me. You were about as close to dying without being dead as any man or animal I’ve ever seen. But you told me not to call, so I didn’t.”
He didn’t remember. “Or my father.”
It didn’t jolt her in the least. She seemed unaware that she’d once been married to the man. That this sort of situation might be considered uncomfortable by some. “I figured he knew what you were up to and had already made his peace with it. That’s the way your pa is.”
“You haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Folks don’t change.”
“I suppose I have to agree.”
The pumpkin-headed boy shifted outside the room, and the floorboards creaked. “You want to talk about Megan now, don’t you?”
“Yes. Did she ever visit you, Tandy Mae?”
“A couple’a times over the last few months. She would stop by on occasion. She and that Callie Anson.”
“To drop off moon.”
She nodded. “My husband Jimmy Ray had a taste for it, though he didn’t indulge like some of them in the hollow.”
“Callie told me she didn’t know the farm.”
“You asked if she’d seen my children, didn’t you? She never saw them.”
“She didn’t know the name Lusk.”
“We had to sell the farm ten years back. We been tenants ever since, working for the man who bought it. His name is Cyril Patchee. This is the Patchee Place. When we put in an order for moon, we use Cyril’s name.”
“I never knew.”
“No reason why you should.”
“How was it? Seeing Megan again for the first time in years?”
Tandy Mae looked in his eyes for the first time. “It settled some of my heart. We didn’t talk much like mother and daughter. We chatted like a couple of old town nellies. She’d come on her own too and help me with the babies. She liked taking them down by the river and spending time there on the wet mornings. We got along fine, and
she never took me to task for making the choices I made.”
Shad got the impression she was truly sorry for all the lost years. He tried to put a hand on her elbow, but he couldn’t make it without the stitches pulling.
“How’d she get here on those days when she was alone?” he asked. “It’s too far to walk. She couldn’t have taken Pa’s pickup without him knowing.”
“I don’t know. She’d just show up. I figured Callie was dropping her off down the road.”
“No,” Shad said. “Not Callie.”
“Well, someone then.”
That’s right, someone. “Did she ever talk about anyone? A boy or a man in her life?”
“No. But toward the end . . . the last one or two times I saw her . . . she seemed excited about something. Happy, the way a young girl should be.”
“A girl in love?”
Tandy Mae, who’d left his father to take up with her own cousin, forging a life from a leased hardscrabble farm and dying cherry trees, who perhaps knew a good deal about love, said, “Maybe. She had this new glow to her. She sometimes went down to the river after the kids were quieted and spent some time with a pad and pen. I think she wrote poetry.”
“Or letters.”
“Maybe so. The water trails past the edge of our property here, way out back, farther east than where you came down from. It wasn’t my place to act motherly. She was a girl who knew her own mind. Maybe she was meeting a boy there. I don’t rightly know.”
The rage woke inside him and he wanted to take Tandy Mae by the shoulders and shake her and ask why she let the girl go down there alone. After so much time had passed, why not ask questions and get to the truth instead of putting her to work watching over an ever-increasing band of ill children.
Mags had gone down to the river and tossed her letters out on the current and sent them to her new love. To someone who would be able to quote from them when he met her later on, in the night, on the bad road.
IT TOOK THREE WEEKS BEFORE HE FELT STRONG enough to take a step outside. Shad hadn’t spoken to his father in all that time and wondered if the man was worried. Or if Pa had made do cutting and polishing Megan’s headstone.
The December air had a heaviness to it, crisp and hard. It hadn’t snowed in the hollow for almost twelve years, but he wouldn’t be surprised if the sky cracked wide and heaved down a blizzard. As above, so below. He was getting colder but still fighting for his cool.
When he thought he could handle it, he walked across the property, headed down to the river, and sat at the shore. He wondered if the snake handlers might still be after him. Lucas Gabriel hadn’t wanted to involve the police, but had he eventually done it? Were Increase Wintel and Dave Fox after him?
He bent, put his hands in the icy river, and splashed his face. No, his thinking was still a little foggy. Dave wouldn’t have gone three weeks before checking on Tandy Mae’s farm. Either nobody gave a damn or he was considered lost up on Jonah Ridge or Dave had been around and knew exactly where Shad was but was giving him time to recuperate.
The pumpkin-headed kid stood a few yards off, sort of hiding behind a small copse of cottonwood. Shad waved and the kid fluttered his four fingers, beckoning.
“Daddy,” the boy said, with a heavy thrum of sorrow. His strange voice carried in the woods and echoed above the sound of the water surging over rocks. For a moment Shad thought the kid was calling him his daddy. But no, that wasn’t it.
Oh Mama, what now.
Shad stood, walked over to the boy, and saw that a pile of wildflowers had been laid out on a patch of washed-out ground.
The grave had been shallow to begin with. It looked like a runoff of rain edged down the grade toward the river and had eroded a wide track of soil.
The forehead and eyes of the man were still covered with dirt, but his nose and chin were now exposed. A few plumes of hair stuck up like brown weeds. Most of the flesh was gone and his jaws had been pried open by animals going after the tongue.
So, there’s Jimmy Ray Lusk.
Shad turned to say something but the kid had vanished into the brush. From the corner of his eye he spotted Tandy Mae, carrying one of her brood, coming straight for him. Was he supposed to run? Was she going to shoot him in the head for discovering the body?
He stood his ground for no other reason than inertia. Where was he going to go?
The baby was wrapped tightly in a blanket and from what Shad could see, it only had two small holes where its ears should be.
Glancing down, Tandy Mae said, “I killed him.”
“I figured that part.”
“With his own gun. Then I tossed him in the truck and drove him down here.”
“I see. Any particular reason why you did it?” Not that anybody needed one.
That closed-up face opened just a little. “He wanted to stop.”
His thoughts were ahead of him. He knew what she meant but couldn’t help but repeat the word. “Stop?”
“Stop giving me children,” she explained.
You didn’t have a dialogue with someone like this, he knew, about things like this, but he couldn’t quit so far in. He sounded a touch more weary than he actually felt. “Why did you want even more?”
“You didn’t notice, did you?”
“I guess not.”
“They’re boys,” she said. “All my babies. They’re boys. I wanted another girl. I wouldn’t let him stop until he gave me a girl.”
“But why did you want a girl so badly?”
She frowned and touched her forehead with her free hand, like somebody was knocking from the other side of her skull. “I needed to make up for leaving Megan behind.”
It made no sense. “But you were talking to her again, after all those years.”
“I’d already done it by then.”
The infant threw the bottle on the ground. Shad stooped with a grunt, picked it up, and the cutting, familiar smell hit him. He squirted a few drops of the bottle’s contents into his palm and saw that the liquid was clear. He dipped the tip of his tongue into it.
She was giving the babies moon.
He stared at her with a mix of regret, hopelessness, and indifference.
“It’s the only thing that will get them quiet,” she told him. “This child I’m holding is deaf and mute and got no knees. You think you could live like that without some make-liquor to hold you over?”
“No,” he whispered.
“You gonna tell the police about this?”
“No,” he said. If Sheriff Increase Wintel put her in jail, who in the hell would take care of all the ill children?
“I didn’t think so. You don’t even sound upset. Do me a favor then and cover up Jimmy Ray’s nose. He always had such a big goddamn nose, I should’ve cut it off first.”
Tandy Mae trudged off with the kid in her arms. The pumpkin-headed boy slipped out of the brush and started kicking flowers and leaves over his dead father’s nose. Shad stood there in silence for a while, then wandered off, trembling. The little tap of moon he’d taken had given him a bad thirst for it.
There were sticker bushes on the shore. Where a young girl might scratch her cheek before lying back to sleep or to daydream, to cry or fret or hum to herself. Where she could be with a man, perhaps for the first time, perhaps for the last.
His toe scuffed over a hump in the dirt.
The things you went and tripped over. You never knew what you were going to find.
It was a beer bottle, half-buried in the mud.
He pulled it out and saw a piece of paper stuffed inside.
Shad smashed the glass against a rock, plucked through the shards and found that the paper had been perfectly folded into quarters.
He opened it and read:
Glad to see you’re okay
Chapter Eighteen
TANDY MAE PACKED UP THE WHOLE BROOD OF ill children in her truck and drove Shad back to Mrs. Rhyerson’s boardinghouse. He lay on his back, in his room, waiting for the end to fi
nd him.
It wouldn’t be long. He’d pulled at all the threads he could find, and gone into the hills, and now whatever was up there had to come down to town. He knew it would happen but he was getting sick of waiting.
With moonlight tracked across his brow, Shad awoke naked on his feet, standing at the side of the bed with a woman seated next to him, her open hand on his back. For an instant he thought it was Jerilyn. And then her sister. Even as he stared and shook off the feeling, he nearly spoke Rebi’s name. He was still panting, and his sweat plied down across the vivid partially healed wounds on his belly.
She leaned up on her knees and embraced him from behind, shimmering in the silver radiance of the room. The glass pane was coated with a trace of ice, and the shadows of frosted patterns wheeled against the far wall.
There was a remote sense of dissatisfaction within him. As if he had not yet completed the chore set before him. It was the kind of feeling you got used to after a while.
Elfie Danforth nodded down at him, gave him a flicker of that devastating smile, and Shad felt himself curl up and roll over inside. That rough tickle started working through his chest.
“What are you doing here, Elf?”
“The hell kind of question is that to ask me?”
A foolish one. You had to work with what was given to you.
Her shoulder-length blond hair caught in the breeze and came after him in a tangle. He wanted to run his palms along the angle of her nose, around the sharp jut of her chin. She grinned and it crinkled her eyes.
“I told you,” she said, joking, trying to play around some, “that you were a stupid man.”
“As I recall, I didn’t argue with you.”
“I’m glad you’re talking to me again. I hate when you’re silent. You’re such a difficult person to love.”
And here he was thinking he was so easy to get along with.
“I don’t mean to be,” he said.
“I know that.” She took his face in her hands and drew him to her and she held him like that for a time. “Did you find out what happened up on Gospel Trail? Do you know how Megan died?”
“No.”
“So you’re going to keep looking.”
November Mourns Page 19
