“Don’t move!” Doc called out. “Charlie, we’ve got to do something.”
Charlie stood there a moment, not sure what to do next. Then, before he knew he had come to a decision, he hurried out into the shallows, lay on his stomach in the water, and reached out toward Luther.
“Take my hand, goddamnit!” Charlie yelled.
The quicksand was already up to Luther’s chest. One arm, his good one, was still clear of the ooze. Carefully inching forward, Charlie strained to reach it but fell short. He got up, not knowing where the quicksand began, and moved closer. Again he threw himself on his stomach and extended his hand. ‘“TAKE IT!” he shouted, his only thought now to rescue the other man and pull him to the safety of the shore.
The quicksand was up to Luther’s neck now. Suddenly the screaming stopped. Charlie saw that Luther’s head was now completely submerged, his one good arm alone on the surface, struggling to grab hold of something. Pushing himself a dangerous few inches closer, Charlie strained every muscle and took hold. Then, yelling at Doc, he ordered, “Grab my legs! Start pulling me back!”
Charlie began to tug on the hand, desperately trying to dredge Luther out of the quicksand. “Keep holding me, Doc! Charlie shouted and all at once he heard a sucking sound and felt the quicksand give. He looked up and saw that Luther’s head, covered with ooze, had regained the surface. “We got him now!” Charlie twisted his hand around to strengthen his grip. But at that moment something happened: Afterward Charlie would try to convince himself that Luther’s reaction was just typical of a desperate and drowning man. That was how Charlie would explain it later. But at the time Charlie was aware of the sudden strength that surged from Luther’s arm, wrenching his hand around suddenly so that instead of Charlie holding Luther’s hand, it was Luther who held Charlie. And he wasn’t just holding him, he was pulling him toward the quicksand.
“For Christ’s sake help me, Doc!” Charlie yelled. Just then Luther’s eyes opened. Later Charlie would tell himself it had been some kind of optical illusion: The declining sunlight must have struck Luther’s irises at a strange angle, making his eves flash with the same sharp, otherworldly gleam that Charlie had seen in the eyes of certain animals— cats, mainly, but also snakes. Burning with hideous mockery, these eyes could only belong to something inhuman and terrible, something that looked out at Charlie through Luther’s sockets, as if through a mask.
Luther’s mouth opened. He seemed to grin, as if laughing soundlessly.
“DOC!” Charlie screamed, feeling himself being dragged under, down into the quicksand.
But Doc no longer had hold of him. The next second Charlie heard the crack of a rifle reverberating from one side of the river to the other. He looked back and saw where the bullet had struck Luther, right between the eves. There was not a flicker of expression anywhere in the man’s dead face.
And all at once, Charlie’s hand was free.
Panting and shaken, Charlie staggered back to the river bank. Doc took hold of his arm, but neither man spoke a word. All around them the darkness was closing in. They watched as Luther s body again sank from view beneath the ooze, his fingers clenched as though still reaching for Charlie’s hand until they disappeared into the darkness of the shallows.
The next day Charlie brought a team of men out to the river to recover the body. For the following three days every foot of the shallows was dredged and probed. But no trace of the body was ever found.
4
Catherine Kline lived for four months. When death finally took the girl Doc continued to shield her from prying eyes, instructing the town’s undertaker, Tommy Lee Anderson, to leave a coffin on Doc’s back porch. Later that night Charlie McAlister accompanied Doc out to the old Confederate graveyard, where the two men silently lowered the coffin into the ground.
Around four o’clock the next morning, Rev. Kline walked behind the barn of Jesse Millard’s farmhouse, where all his farming equipment was kept. There the minister turned on Jesse Millard’s new thresher, sucked his breath in, then carefully crawled under the machine. He looked up into the deadly whirlwind inches above him and then, in a paroxysm of despair, lifted his body into the blades.
5
Doc stood at the window of his house. In his hand he held a syringe, its contents sufficient to kill a grown man within seconds. He looked down at it and saw that his hand was trembling. “If only I knew,’’ he whispered to himself. “If only I could be sure.” He stared out into the darkness that had engulfed the little town, his eyes fixed on the horizon of stars. He looked at them with the sad, unspeakable love another man might feel thumbing through an album of old photographs as one by one the much-loved, now-dead faces came before him. Slowly Doc pulled the heavy black drapes across his windows.
They would not be drawn back again for fifteen years.
Part One:
The Return
1
On the last Friday in May, right before six o’clock in the evening, a Trailways bus turned off old Georgia 44 and into K.J. Thompson’s Texaco, the one and only service station in the sleepy backwater town of Lucerne.
Twenty minutes earlier, K.J. and his black mechanic, Carl, had locked up and gone home for the day. Across the street, Tom Harlan had retired to the back room of Becky’s Department Store to go over his accounts. Charlie McAlister was normally just closing up his sheriff’s office about then, but today he had taken his son—Larry had just turned fourteen—to Willard for a Little League game. The only other person around was the town’s barber, Slim McGee, who, for the past hour, had been restlessly pacing the floor of his barbershop, checking outside every five minutes to see if Charlie had gotten back. There was something Slim had to talk to him about.
Earlier in the afternoon Big Phil Beck had dropped by to get his sideburns trimmed. One of those men who felt obliged to have an opinion on everything—from the origin of the universe to the best brand of fertilizer—Big Phil was always ready to correct other people’s misguided ideas. And while he would talk anywhere, his favorite place to expound his views was the big chair at Slim’s barbershop, speaking to whoever was present—even if it happened to be only Slim McGee—in a tone of voice that most men can produce only with the help of an amplified sound system. It was from this chair that ten years earlier, Big Phil had ignited the bitterest of the town s barbershop controversies by claiming to have evidence that Martin Luther King—or Martin Lucifer Coon, as Big Phil persisted in calling him—had been a Russian spy dyed to look just like a Negro. When Mack Taylor challenged him on this, asking in particular about his lips, Big Phil—not to be backed into a corner—said that the Communists had their ways. From that point the exchange became quickly overheated, with an exasperated Mack Taylor finally declaring that Big Phil didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground. “Least I ain’t no nigger-lover,” Big Phil replied coolly. After which it took Slim and Charlie McAlister a good five minutes to persuade Mack to stop beating Big Phil’s head against Slim’s barber pole.
Today Big Phil was at it again, airing his theory on kudzu—the fast-growing vine that, at this time of the year in Georgia, was scattering itself like wildfire across anything that stood still for longer than an hour or two. Well, Big Phil declared, it was all part of a Japanese plot to undermine American agriculture. He had seen documents in The Lightning Bolt to prove it.
For the past hour now Slim had been mulling over this question, dismayed that Charlie wasn’t around to shed some light on it. Ordinarily, when Slim would become too agitated by one of Big Phil’s pronouncements, he would run next door, saying, “I’m going to check that out with Charlie.” Bursting into the sheriff’s office, Slim would lay it all out before Charlie, then ask him, “What you think about it?” Charlie would only shake his head, as if overwhelmed by the complexity of the issue before him. “Well, Slim, I guess there’s a little truth to both sides.” And Slim, his mouth open in wonderment at the coincidence, w
ould exclaim, “Why, you know, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was thinking!”
Stepping outside his shop for the fifteenth time in the past hour, Slim looked over to where Charlie usually parked his car. It was still vacant. He glanced over at K. J.’s and stared suspiciously at the kudzu that was creeping up the side of the station. He hadn’t noticed it there the day before, and Slim found himself wondering if it might be some new experimental kind of kudzu, even worse than the old. “Them damn japs,” he whispered, shaking his head. Slim was about to go back inside when he heard a groaning noise from down the highway. Just then the Trailways bus made its turn into K. J.’s Texaco.
Puzzled, Slim watched as someone got off the bus, someone Slim had never laid eyes on before. A boy who, judging from the puniness of his looks, couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. He was dressed poorly, in a frayed T-shirt and blue jeans two sizes too big. He did not look up as the bus pulled off but remained exactly where the bus had set him out, looking neither to the left nor the right, in front or behind, just standing there with a battered cardboard box clutched tightly to his thin chest as if, all around, people were jostling to pry it loose. But there wasn’t a soul in sight. “Well, I’ll be,’’ Slim muttered to himself, looking around to see if anybody was coming to fetch the boy. He had to be somebody’s kin—a nephew or grandson—only it was peculiar that nobody had told Slim about it.
Slim waited a little longer to see if anyone showed up; then, determined to figure out what was going on, he walked down the steps and crossed Philippi, Lucerne’s main street. He stopped a few feet from the boy and nodded. “Howdy.”
The boy didn’t look up. He didn’t even seem to hear Slim.
“Somebody coming to fetch you, young fella?” But again there was no response, except a slight wince.
“You waiting on some kinfolk? You tell me who it is and maybe I can help you find them.” Then seeing that this didn’t work and beginning to wonder if the boy was deaf and dumb as well as puny. Slim sighed and tried once more. “Maybe if you was to tell me your name, son.” Without looking up at Slim, the boy began to stutter something. It took Slim a moment or two to figure out what he was saving.
“Well, Jamey, you got you a last name, too?”
The boy didn’t say. He didn’t even seem to be breathing. He reminded Slim of a cornered rabbit, like he was hoping Slim would forget about him if he just stayed still long enough.
Again Slim asked his name, this time putting his hand on the boy’s skinny shoulder. He could feel clear through to the bone. The boy flinched away, then looked up for a second, his eyes watery and frightened. There was a tic on his left cheek, throbbing like a sparrow’s heart.
“I wasn’t going to hurt you none.”
“I-I-I w-was s-suppose to w-w-wait,” the boy stuttered back.
“Who told you to wait?”
But Slim didn’t find out. For at that moment, Abigail Parker’s battered Studebaker pulled into the lot of the Texaco. She stopped next to the boy and flung open the door on the passenger’s side.
“You Jamey?” she said with a snarl, sounding mean as ever.
The boy glanced at her, looking scared out of his wits, then nodded.
“What you waiting on?” she demanded. “Ain’t you never seen a car before?” Noticing that Slim was still watching her, she scowled at him as if he were a doubtful piece of produce—a wilted head of lettuce or a bruised tomato. “You got staring problems?”
“He your nephew or something, Abigail?”
“Ain’t got no nephew. Ain’t got no kin at all,” Abigail barked. Staring Slim straight in the eye, challenging him to take it or leave it, she added, “This here’s orphan boy Jamey, and I done took him in out of the goodness of my heart.” And with that, the boy stepped in the car, managing to get the door only halfway shut before Abigail pulled back off onto Philippi, her tires squealing.
2
“Where was you yesterday?” Slim asked Charlie the next morning, and before Charlie could remind Slim about his son’s game, Slim had launched into the story of Abigail’s orphan.
At first Charlie was a little wary. Only a week before, Slim had hurried into Charlie’s office, announcing in the same breathless voice that Becky had killed her husband’s girlfriend just that morning. Startled, Charlie had said, “Becky Lovett?”
“Becky Lovett?” Slim had repeated. “What about Becky Lovett, Charlie?”
At which point, Charlie had realized that Slim wasn’t referring to the town’s seventy-six-year-old postmistress. “I was talking about Becky on World Turns. You know, that pretty little girl with them bangs: What’s Becky Lovett got to do with anything, Charlie?” So when Charlie heard about Abigail’s mystery orphan, he thought it best to double-check. “We are talking about Abigail Parker, aren’t we?”
“Course I am. How many Abigails we got around here?” And off he went, reciting for Charlie the events of the previous afternoon. “And the way that orphan was acting, kind of retardlike.”
“Sounds like he was shy.”
“No, sir, Charlie,” Slim said authoritatively, “he had them retard eyes.”
Charlie frowned, but before he could say anything, Slim had gone back to the subject of Abigail. “You tell me, Charlie, what’s an old biddy like Abigail doing taking in some poor retard orphan boy. Why, she’s the meanest woman in three counties. Wouldn’t cross the street to give a dying man a drink of water. And cheap? Why, she’s so cheap she charges the squirrels in them pecan trees of hers rent in the wintertime. Even if that orphan retard is a mite puny, he’s still got to eat. So if he ain’t no kin to her, what’s she doing taking him in? Ain’t out of no goodness of her heart. And that’s a fact.”
Slim’s point was well taken, and within days a great flurry of speculation had erupted throughout Lucerne concerning the boy’s true identity. It was this, more than the word “orphan” with its fine scriptural ring, that explained the sudden outpouring of Christian charity from Lucy Babcock, president of the Baptist Women’s Circle. Four days after the boy’s arrival, she dropped by Abigail’s house, accompanied by three other Circle ladies, all of them armed to the teeth with chocolate chip cookies and raisin cake. But Abigail didn’t give an inch. She met the ladies at the door of the house and immediately whisked the sweets away, saying they were bad for a growing boy, especially one as puny as her orphan. She didn’t see as they could hurt her any, though, especially considering the fuss that had been gone to. Undaunted, the Baptist Circle ladies vainly tried to pry loose Abigail’s secret, “Why, Abigail, it sure was mighty Christian of you, taking in that orphan boy. And him coming all the way from . . . Now where did you say you got him?” But no matter how craftily the question was put, Abigail was prepared with her all purpose answer. “I don’t hold with digging up dirt. And 1 don’t hold with them that do.” Whereupon, sweets in hand, Abigail slammed the screen door in their faces.
But even Abigail couldn’t keep people from guessing. Maybe he was the child of a dead relative. For despite her words to Slim, Abigail did have kin, though she had long ago disowned them all, seizing on the slightest pretext to sever the relation: A squabble over a dead aunt’s china. A nephew’s fondness for Coca-Cola. A cousin’s unflattering remarks about her overly liberal use of sorghum syrup. And once Abigail cut someone, they stayed cut. There was even a story that told how years before—right after her feud with old Doc—Abigail had one night taken out her pair of sewing scissors and laboriously excised every reference in her family Bible to forgiving those who trespass against us.
Still, there were some who paid no attention to the gossip surrounding the orphan’s arrival, insisting that the boy should be treated like anybody else. This, at least, was the position taken by Charlie’s wife, Lou Anne, at the weekly meeting of the Methodist Circle. Thinking to triumph where the Baptist ladies had failed, the Methodist women were planning their line of assault on A
bigail. Twice Lou Anne had offered her own viewpoint: Just leave Jamey alone and don’t carry him any more raisin cakes and cookies. “He’s a boy, not a funeral.” But each time she was ignored. “Why, Lou Anne, you know old Abigail’s hiding something,” Slim’s wife, Edna May, explained. “Why, the writing’s right there on the wall for all to see. As the Bible says, Them that got eyes, let ’em look.” When ‘Edna May was asked what exactly she was getting at, her face darkened and her voice dropped. “That boy, he’s the fruit of forbidden lust,” Edna explained. “All you got to do is look at him, afflicted the way he is. He’s bearing the sins of his momma and daddy on them slumpy little shoulders, all right. Incest, most likely,” Edna May whispered to the Methodist ladies. “And you want to know why old Abigail took him in? Wasn’t no goodness of her heart.” Edna May then told how, just the day before, she had seen Abigail wearing a brand-new dress and a hat. A red hat with a feather. “Where you think Abigail got the money to be spending on finery? It’s cause somebody’s paying her to take in that orphan, that’s why.”
“But who’d want to pay her?” Sarah Bradley asked.
“Them whose sins is a-sitting on that poor little retard’s head,” Edna May went on, displaying her compassionate side.
Deliver Us From Evil Page 2