High Lonesome Sound

by Jaye Wells

  “I’m leaving Moon Hollow.” She said it in such a way that he got the impressions she’d only just made the final decision.

  “When?” he asked, confused at the strange segue.

  “Soon.” Her mouth turned up into a Mona Lisa smile.

  Talking to this girl was like walking through a room filled with funhouse mirrors. One minute she seemed gullible and the next, a budding femme fatale. Lord help the men of the world if she ever permanently shrugged off her innocence and realized her true power.

  “Where are you going?” He felt disoriented, like he’d spun in rapid circles and was trying to locate true North.

  “Don’t know yet.”

  He frowned at her. “You don’t know when or where, but you’re leaving? Why?”

  The smile faded and her eyes got this far-away look, as if she’d retreated into the part of her brain that made all her bad decisions. “Because if I stay I’m gonna end up just like the bear, like Jack and my mama, too.”

  A spike of fear stabbed him just above his heart. “Ruby, promise me you’re not just going to take off without anyone and no idea where you’re going.”

  Her attention snapped back to his face. “Well why not? It’ll be an adventure. Like Huckleberry Finn sailing down the Mississippi.”

  “Huck had Jim, Ruby. He didn’t set off by himself.”

  She grinned up at him. “Will you be my Jim, Peter?”

  29

  Coffin Nails

  Cotton

  The open door of the cast-iron stove looked like the devil’s own mouth. Hungry flames writhed inside like obscene tongues that hissed his name.

  Fuckin’ people. ’Specially that uppity Deacon Fry.

  Cotton fed another stick into the stove. Sparks jumped out and sizzled on his arm. He licked the burnt spot and the flavor of sweat, corn whiskey, and ash bit his tongue. He should've known better than to go to the funeral, but he’d always liked watching young Jack play football. Damned shame.

  Life was just an endless string of disappointments. He lifted the plastic milk jug to his lips. The hooch burned and stripped the spit from his tongue. Yes, sir, a damned shame.

  The rocking chair had been carved by his pappy’s own hand. The woven straw seat creaked as he rocked—the sound like the song of pines deep in the woods on a windy day. He smoothed a finger over the glossy arm, worn smooth from decades of hands resting in that spot. Pappy’s hands, Daddy's hands, and now his hands.

  Forty-five years ago, he’d sat on Pappy’s lap in this chair. He’d been five? Six? Who the hell knew? He still could smell the scent of cigarettes and sweat that clung to Pappy’s skin like cologne. He still could see the deep network of wrinkles on the old man's neck and the gray hairs curling out of his ears like smoke.

  "Cotton," he'd say, “a man's job is to take care of his family.”

  Pappy's fingers were thick and tanned, his knuckles permanently rough and chapped; they were strong hands—a real man's tools. Cotton looked at the graying hairs on his own knuckles. The insides of his index and middle fingers were stained permanently yellow and always stank strongly of nicotine.

  "A man has to take care of this family,” Pappy said, “because without a family, you can't be a real man."

  Rose had been his family. Now she was gone and he couldn't even take care of himself.

  Was he a real man, anymore? Had he ever been?

  He took another swig of his home-brewed therapy.

  He ain’t felt like a man ever since he saw all them spots on the X-ray and the doc said his lungs was blacker than coal. Hell, he’d barely felt human since Rose died.

  "Real men don't cry." This advice, given by his daddy, who’d learned it from Pappy, had been punctuated by the snap of leather on skin and the taste of blood on the tongue as he bit back tears. “Real men ain’t pussies, son.”

  Daddy and Pappy had taught him an ungrateful woman sometimes needed a reminder to appreciate all the sacrifices her man made for her and her children. They’d both done their best to show him how to live a good life. They worked down in the mines and kept working after their own X-rays developed polkie dots. Back then, insurance company lawyers didn’t keep a man from workin’ just because his lungs weren’t pink anymore.

  A rasping sound came from nearby. His eyes couldn't focus too good, but he rose and he stumbled to the small window. Outside, tree trunks creaked and swayed in the darkening dusk. No matter how much he squinted they wouldn't stand still.

  That noise again—like a hoof on concrete or a match against sandpaper. It made his back teeth itch. He closed his eyes to listen, but his pulse pounded in his ears. He’d had too much to drink again. It meant another night alone in the cabin, but he liked it that way.

  The sound didn't come again. He opened his lids and relaxed his eyes until they lost focus, until his vision went blurry, like someone had smeared lard across the windowpane. Through the haze, a shape darted between the trees. The shadow was too large and moved too fast to be anything friendly. He rubbed his eyes to clear them. The trees were still there swaying. The sun was lower now, but the thing—whatever it was—had disappeared.

  Craving warmth, he returned to his chair by the fire and his hooch. He leaned back and took a nice long swig before closing his eyes for a catnap.

  When he woke, the room was darker. The fire still crackled in the stove, but the air at his back was colder. He wasn't sure what had woken him. On the edge of his brain the misty silhouette of some forgotten dream taunted him. He tried to focus on it to remember, but the more he shined the light of his attention on it, the further the dream retreated into the shadows of memory.

  “Hello, Cotton."

  The two softly spoken words entered through his ears and seared an icy path straight to his heart. No hooch in the world could warm him now. He jumped from the chair. He clinched his fists and ignored the rush of bile up the back of his throat. “Who's there?”

  But no one was there. No intruder stood nearby, no man-shaped shadows darkened the corners of the room, and when he opened the door no one stood on the doorstep. Cotton closed the door and locked the latch. He backed up toward this chair and fought to get his pulse under control.

  Still, his skin prickled cold as if he were being watched. The darkened window across the room looked like a dilated pupil. He half expected to see a white face and two red glowing eyes staring at him through the panes, but there was nothing except the nagging dread that he was not alone.

  "I say, who's there?”

  The only response was the wind outside and a faint scratching.

  Dammit, you old fool, you done drunk too much and now you're seeing the boogeyman. It’s just the trees.

  The old milk jug sat beside the rocking chair. The brown liquor inside was barely two inches lower than it had been when he started drinking earlier that evening. Normally it took at least four inches before he started seeing things that weren’t there.

  The knock on the door had a familiar pattern to it, and he realized it was the old “Shave and a Haircut” rhythm.

  Two bits.

  It was only after his brain filled in the missing two beats that he realized he should be worried. “Who is it?"

  The knock sound it again—shave and a haircut. And again, faster this time— shaveandahaircut. Each time Cotton mumbled “Two bits,” before demanding again that his visitor identify himself.

  Da-dum dum dum dum.

  “Two bits,” Cotton cried. “God damn it, who’s there?” This time he grabbed his shotgun from the doorjamb and unhooked the latch. The door bounced off the wall and hit Cotton on the side. He was only vaguely aware of the pain.

  Standing on his doorstep was not the white-faced devil with red eyes he’d imagined.

  “Jack,” he whispered. “Jack, son, is that you?”

  The boy’s skin was gray and his cheeks sunken in like a collapsed mine. His clothes, torn and covered in blood. But it was the boy’s eyes that shocked the old man. His pupils were as
dark and cold as the swimming hole on a January night.

  “Jack?”

  The boy stared at him for a good minute before moving. His lips were cracked and bloodied, but the inside was worse—a cavern filled with broken-off teeth like stalactites and stalagmites, and a white tongue like a dead grub. No words came out, but a dry click escaped his throat.

  Cotton coughed in sympathy. The boy looked like hell, but now that he knew it wasn’t a murderer at his door, his pulse slowed and he left behind fright mode in favor of fix-it mode. He pulled Jack’s arm to bring him inside, but the boy’s skin burned his fingertips like dry ice. He yanked his hand away and stuck it into his pocket. “Hell, son, get your ass in here where it’s warm.”

  His visitor stepped inside the cabin. Cotton shut the door and leaned the gun against the wall. Then, he scooted around Jack to pull a dusty beer cooler from the corner to use as a seat. He motioned to his rocking chair. “Have a seat.”

  The boy lowered himself into the chair as instructed. Cotton rubbed his hands together. They’d gone numb with cold ever since Jack walked in the door. When that didn’t work, he grabbed his milk jug and took a swig. Once the bracing fire seared a path down to his gut, he wiped the opening with his shirt cuff and offered the jug to Jack. “This should warm ya up. My own recipe.”

  No response from his guest. The only sounds were the crackling of wood in the stove and the creak of the rocking chair’s runners on the warped floorboards.

  He couldn’t look at those eyes. He shrugged and took another drink before capping the jug and stashing it close to his right foot. Three inches down now.

  Something tugged at the back of his mind. Like how Ruby used to pull on his sleeve to tell him secrets when she was too young to be scared of him. What was it? Something from earlier that day. Something about Jack.

  The rocking chair creaked back and forth.

  Jack was wearing a miner’s rig. Blue coveralls with neon orange safety tape down the arms. His throwing hand lay bent at an odd angle on his lap. The right sleeve was torn clean away. A black stain covered his chest. His face looked like it had been on the losing end of a humdinger of a fight.

  “You all right, son?”

  What was it he was supposed to remember?

  The stove’s heat had chased away the lingering chill. Under the wood smoke and the rubbing alcohol scent of the moonshine, there was now a new smell. A sickly sweet, off scent, like turned meat.

  Meat.

  Dead meat.

  Cotton stumbled over the back of the cooler. He scrambled back until he hit the wall. Only when there was no place left to go, did he look at Jack.

  The boy still rocked back and forth in Pappy’s chair. A grin spread across the gray face, making him look like some kind of sinister jack-o’-lantern.

  “You’re—the funeral—Oh, God!” Three inches of moonshine rushed out his mouth like a crowd pushing through an emergency exit. It happened so fast, he didn’t have time to turn his head. The front of his good church shirt clung hot and wet to his clammy skin. His brain wasn’t working right. Nothing was right. Jack was dead.

  Cotton mumbled words he remembered from some psalm he’d memorized in Sunday school as a boy. “Deliver me, oh my God, out of the hand of the wicked, out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel--”

  A mean coughing fit broke off his prayer. He could barely get enough air in to cough back out.

  The thing in the rocking chair laughed. “Your God abandoned you a month ago.”

  The cane seat groaned as the thing rose to approach him. Cotton whimpered and pushed himself sideways into the farthest corner. Jack had been a big boy when he was alive, but dead, with the stink of death on him and the cold eyes, he seemed fifteen feet tall.

  The thing knelt. Joints popped like gunshots. “Cotton.”

  He whimpered again. God damn him—he whimpered like a child.

  “Shh,” it said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  Cotton wrapped his arms around himself. “Yer the devil!”

  The thing’s low chuckle sent a puff of putrid breath into his face. Hot spit pooled in his mouth.

  “Rose wants to see you again.”

  Suddenly he felt more sober than he had in months. He sat up and wiped the bile and spit from his lips. “You seen Rose?”

  The thing nodded. “You want to be with her again, don’t you, Cotton?”

  Cotton might be a drunk and a son-of-a-bitch, but he’d grown up hearing stories about what happened to fellas who made deals with Old Scratch. “You ain’t stealing my soul, Devil!”

  The thing pulled out a packet of Marlboros, not the generic cancer sticks he had to buy because he couldn’t afford better, and took its time packing it against bloody knuckles and unwrapping the cellophane. It lifted one to those ruined lips and lit it with a wooden match. Its eyes closed as it inhaled a deep lungful. The scent of freshly lit tobacco and the hints of sulfur and burning wood from the match pushed away the stink of decay and reminded him of his Pappy, who smoked Reds every day of his life.

  The thing offered the pack to him. The pristine white tip of the filter peeked from inside its brown wrapper. He needed that cigarette more than he needed another swig of shine, for the moment, anyway.

  “Go on,” the thing said. “Takin’ it ain’t a promise.”

  That voice. His attention moved from the cigarettes to the face of the thing kneeling over him. Only, instead of Jack, it was his Pappy. “C’mon now, son. I promise I won’t tell yer mama.”

  Suddenly he was five again. Pappy stood next to his workbench in the old garage. The scent of motor oil and sawdust. Light spilling in through the open door. His hero had bent down and offered his smoldering cigarette to him. His first drag had burned his tiny, perfect lungs like poison, and he’d coughed for so long he thought he’d die. Pappy had laughed, and pounded him on the back. “That’ll put hair on yer chest.”

  He’d never tasted anything so awful, but the approval on Pappy’s face and the pride of being considered a man had imprinted on him so permanently that by the time his balls dropped he had a pack-a-day habit.

  “Just one,” the thing that looked like his Pappy said. “Here I’ll light it for you. That’s a good boy.”

  Then the filter was between his lips. His tongue touched the filter, the soft fibrous circle surrounded by the sharp edge of paper. Pappy struck the match. The comforting brimstone scent pinched at the inside of his nostrils.

  “Inhale.”

  He did. The smoke soothed the rough edges of his nausea and filled the hungry cells of his black lungs. He could finally breathe again, even if what he was breathing would likely be the death of him.

  Death.

  Rose.

  He held the smoke inside like a secret. “You saw her?” His voice sounded different inside his head.

  The face was back. Those shark eyes. The thing held out its left hand. He shook his head and pushed himself up with the cigarette dangling between his lips. Once he was upright, he pushed the smoke out slowly.

  The thing sucked down another drag instead of answering. It motioned to the cooler seat. Cotton righted his makeshift seat and settled on top of it. The thing resumed its seat in the rocking chair.

  “Do you know the legend of Moon Hollow?” it asked.

  “Which one?”

  “Jeremiah Moon’s deal with the devil.”

  He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm. Spat it into the corner. Took another drag. “S’pose I might.” He exhaled. “Some say that’s why we have Decoration Day.”

  The thing tipped his chin to confirm. “Cemetery has to be re-consecrated every year or the deal is void.”

  “What did you do to Jack?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  He pondered that for a few moments. Where had his fear gone? He still stank like vomit because he’d been more terrified than he’d been his whole life just a few minutes earlier. But now he felt like he was floating in a warm sea. Felt better than he sho
uld after emptying three inches of shine from his belly. Some part of his brain, way deep down and far back, was flashing like fireflies in June, but he didn’t care. Didn’t care about much, ’cept finding out what this demon man knew about Rose.

  “Decoration Day’s coming, Cotton.”

  He put the cigarette between his lips and inhaled long and slow. Best drag of his life. Talking about cemeteries and deals with the devil shouldn’t make him smile, but he couldn’t fight the urge. The smoke came back out in the shape of a crescent moon. “That so?”

  “Play your cards right and sweet Rose’ll be back in your arms by week’s end.”

  He ran a tongue over his lower lip and tasted raw tobacco and bile. The cigarette burned to a stub between his fingers. The final drag singed his lips, but he smiled. “Tell me how.”

  30

  Cemetery Magic

  Ruby

  The waxing moon was the only witness to Ruby’s sins.

  After her visit to see the bear with Peter where she’d asked him to help her leave Moon Hollow, she’d returned home to an empty house. Edna left a message saying she was going to take the girls home with her for a sleepover. That was just fine with Ruby since she needed time to think.

  She wasn’t sure what drew her back to the attic, but she’d found herself there anyway. Without Jinny there to distract her, she searched deeper into the boxes until she found a cache of books that had belonged to her mother. The book of spells had been at the bottom of the box. On the inside cover, both Granny Maypearl’s and her mama’s names were written in different colored inks. Judging from the dog-eared pages, it had been well read by both of them. Mama could sing like an angel and taught Ruby to hear the mountain’s song, but Ruby had never seen her mess with potions and spells. Had her magic gotten left behind like her songs when she’d returned home? Or had she left it behind before she’d gone to Nashville?