Edge of Dark Water

24

It was decided not to tell Mama about what Terry had told us, least not right away, and that if it was told, we’d leave it to him to do it. I can’t say it felt good to find out how May Lynn had died, but I believed Terry’s story, and it made me feel some better to know he hadn’t just outright murdered her.

We was locked up in that house for a day without much water, and with no real good food to eat, just the last of those greens Mama had cooked up, and they had soured. It finally got to where it was go out and get something to eat or just get in the closet with the old woman and wait for death. I wasn’t certain Skunk was still out there anywhere, but if the stories about Skunk was true, then he could be. But my fear of Skunk couldn’t feed us. I had to get some kind of groceries pulled into the house, even if they was blackberries and frog legs.

There was also the matter of the old woman in the closet. She had already started to stink. She had to be taken out and buried, if for no other reason than so we could stay in that cabin in peace.

I was thinking on all this, bored, prowling around the house, looking for food goods-dried beans or peas, or a very large mouse-and I come upon an old tin box. I opened it. There was some faded blue ribbons inside, a bit of string and such, and there was some old photographs. They was of a young girl and an older man. He was standing with his hand on the girl’s shoulder. He had an expression like something inside him had backed up and stoppered and had turned rotten. The little girl had to be the old woman many years back. I could see something about that face that made me think it was her, but she looked happy. I wondered if she had been happy a lot when she was young. It was hard to imagine, but I reckoned it was true. The man in the picture had the same disappointed and bitter face the old woman had had; she had grown up to be him.

I slipped the photographs back in the tin and put it back where I had found it.

The food hunt being a failure, it was decided someone was going to have to stay with Terry, and someone was going to have to go out there in the big wide world and find something to eat, get the cans with the money and May Lynn. After that, it was all a crapshoot, because there wasn’t no way Terry was well enough for being laid down in the bottom of a boat and floated down to Gladewater.

We had to come up with a plan, and we did. It wasn’t the kind of plan that was going to be taught in military handbooks, but it was something, and it was this: me and Jinx would take the pistol and go and get water and find something to eat and get the cans. Mama would stay with Terry and keep the shotgun. But first we had to get a shovel and bury the old woman and Terry’s sawed-off arm. The idea of the body and arm in the house with us, and the smell they was starting to make, led us to want to get rid of them right away.

Like I said, none of this was anything that would have given Robert E. Lee pause, but it’s what we had.

We had Mama, against her disapproval, lock me and Jinx outside. Jinx carried the pistol, which was now loaded with real bullets, and me and her walked out back and found a shovel shoved up under the house, right where the old woman said it would be. We found some soft dirt that was far away from the well, and we took turns digging and holding the pistol. It took about two hours to get the grave dug deep and wide and long enough. When it was done, we went back to the house and called out to Mama and she let us in. Me and Jinx took the old woman out of the closet. We carried her outside and had Mama lock us out again. Jinx laid the pistol on top of the rolled rug, and with one of us carrying the head end, the other the feet, we toted her to the hole and laid her on the ground. Jinx set the pistol aside. We picked up the old woman again and dropped her in the hole. I ain’t going to lie. It wasn’t done gentle, and there wasn’t no ceremony to it. We started covering her up right away, trying to keep an eye peeled for Skunk. Skunk didn’t appear, and when we finally had her good and buried, Jinx took the shovel and patted the ground solid.

“Should we say some words?” I said.

“How about ‘I’m glad you’re dead, you old bitch’?”

“I was thinking of something nicer. Like she saved Terry’s life by cutting off his arm.”

“Well, then,” Jinx said, “there, you said it.”

Back at the house, we got the box of sawing tools with Terry’s arm in it, and we took it out to a spot by the woods and dug a hole there and buried it.

Next we went down to the river to check on the lard cans and to look for food. I didn’t see sign of Skunk nowhere, but I had this uncomfortable feeling that someone was watching us. I hadn’t had it when we was digging the holes, but now I did, and it was a feeling strong as lye soap. It could have been Skunk, a nest of birds, or just my imagination, but whatever it was made my skin crawl like a snake.

When we got down to the river we seen there was big fresh boot prints in the mud by the water, and the boat we had pulled up under the tree had the bottom hacked out of it. When I saw that, the hair on the back of my neck stuck up like porcupine quills. I looked ever which way, and Jinx did, too, turning with that big horse pistol in her hands, but we didn’t see no one. I sniffed the air. There seemed to be a faint stink hanging about, but it was possible I imagined it.

While Jinx watched, I went to where I had stuffed the cans under the berry vines. They was both there. I got hold of them, and we stood there for a moment trying to decide what to do.

“He’s done hacked the boat up to keep us from leaving,” Jinx said.

“We don’t have to go by river,” I said.

“No,” Jinx said. “But it’s harder for him to get us on the river. We walk out, we might as well just go on and hack off our own hands and cut our own throats now.”

“We’re out of choices.”

“We still got the cabin, that’s something,” Jinx said.

“But no food,” I said.

“We got to take care of that.”

For a couple of scroungers, we didn’t have nothing to carry anything with, so we decided to walk back to the cabin and leave the buckets and try and find a sack to gather up food. Like I said, we wasn’t planners of the first order.

As we went back, that feeling of someone watching grew. I even heard movement off to our right. Jinx did, too, cause she turned the pistol in that direction. But there wasn’t nothing to be seen other than a briar patch, and a mystifying briar patch it was. There was an opening in it here and there, but it was the largest, most twisted-up mess of briars I have ever seen; the whole thing was higher than a tall man’s head. It curled and twined its way from where we was all the way back into the depths of the woods, down to the river.

It was a patch of vines and briars I figured had been there for darn near as long as there had been woods. The patch was more open near where we was, but looking back into it, it got wider and deeper and darker. The vines was big around as my thumb in lots of places, and bigger in others, and the thorns, which looked as sharp and vicious as barbed wire, grew close together in a way that reminded me of those nets you make that are thin at one end and wide at the other. A fish will swim through the neck into the bigger part, and then it’s too dumb to get turned around and swim out.

When we got to the house, and Mama let us in, we put the buckets on the floor near the fireplace. We didn’t tell Mama about the tracks and the boat. She was scared enough with us out there, and we still had to have food.

Outside again, Jinx with the pistol, me tugging a tow sack and a shovel, we went along near the woods and found some wild onions and more dandelion greens. We even dug up some sassafras bushes, got the roots for tea. Meat would have been nice, but there wasn’t any that we could get unless we shot it, and neither me nor Jinx felt we was a good enough shot with a pistol to hit anything that we couldn’t beat to death better with the barrel.

Finally we got our courage up and went back down by the river to where the berry vines were. We picked some berries and put them in the bag, though they got a mite mashed up with everything else in there. Jinx found a dead fish washed up on the bank next to a good-sized log. She picked the fish up and smelled it.

“It ain’t been dead long,” she said. “Pretty good-sized bass.”

“What killed it?”

“Since it didn’t leave a note,” she said, “I’m going to figure it just died.”

Jinx gave me the fish, and I put it in the bag.

It was late afternoon by the time we was back at the house with our fattened sack. Terry was sleeping, and Mama was sitting in the middle of the room in the old woman’s rocking chair, holding the shotgun. The air was stiff as wire and sticky warm.

“We didn’t even know her name,” Mama said. “You buried her, and we don’t even know what to call her.”

“I knew what to call her,” Jinx said.

Mama started to say something, realized it was useless. Nobody was on her side.

I cleaned the fish and put the guts and the head in the fireplace and burned them up. I got a frying pan that looked pretty clean, wiped it out with some rags, and used a bit of lard the old lady had to fry up the fish. Mama cooked the greens and the mashed berries up together in another pot. It was really hot with that fire going in that closed-up house, but we had to eat. When the fish and the greens and berries was cooked up, Mama skinned some of the sassafras root and boiled up some tea from it. We wiped some plates down to where they were serviceable and laid out our supper. Jinx took Terry his, sat on the bed by him and fed him a bite of his, and then ate a bite of hers. We could see them through the open door. Jinx was being so sweet I almost thought she had been stolen away and replaced by someone that looked like her.

Mama sat in the rocking chair with her plate. I sat on the floor with mine, and we ate using our fingers, cause the forks and such looked a lot nastier than the plates. The greens mixed with the berries tasted better than I would have figured, and the fish was fresh dead like Jinx said, and tasted as good as if we had caught it on a hook within the hour.

When we was finished eating, Jinx came out of the bedroom and closed the door on a well-fed and now sleeping Terry. The water in the pot with the sassafras roots was boiling. We poured it in cups and sipped. We took our time about it, sweating in front of the fire. It would have tasted better with some sugar or honey.

Finally I got up, stirred the fire around, broke it down until it wasn’t blazing and wasn’t so hot.

“I’ve been thinking, Sue Ellen,” Mama said, “and I don’t see any other way for it. You and Jinx have to take the boat and go to Gladewater, find some way to come back for Terry and myself.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “That plan’s good enough if we had a boat.”

“What?”

I told her what we had seen. She let out her breath, leaned out of the rocker, and put the cup on the floor. “He can’t still be after us,” she said.

“You’ve heard all the stories we have,” I said. “Someone darn sure wrecked the boat and left boot prints down by the river.”

“It could have been anyone,” Mama said. “Mischievous kids.”

“Kids don’t have feet big as that,” Jinx said.

We sat tight after that, sat there until the room was full of shadow and we heard the wind pick up, followed by rain.

Why couldn’t the damn weather make up its mind? Why couldn’t Skunk just come on and try and get us? This was my thinking, and it just went around and around in a circle. The rain kept building, and pretty soon we could hear lightning crackling and thunder banging around like a drunk in a store full of pots and pans. The storm raged like it did that night on the river, except inside the house we was high and dry. Or was until the roof started to leak. It wasn’t much of a leak, and was near a window, but it made me feel all the more dreary.

Terry woke up a few times in pain, and we gave him some more of the home brew that was there. I hadn’t never wanted to drink, but right then I was thinking of a snort. I didn’t do it, though, if for no other reason than it might give Mama liberty to do the same. Besides, Terry needed it more than any of us.

When Terry finally got back to sleep, I sat by his bed and looked through the open door at Mama rocking slowly in her chair. Rain was coming down the chimney. I could hear what was left of the fire in the fireplace hissing, and there was a bit of smoke. The wind was howling and carrying on and there was sizzling lightning and clattering thunder.

The roof banged loudly. I looked up. It was like a tree limb had fallen on it, but there wasn’t no trees near the house. Maybe one had blown out of the woods and onto the roof.

The sound came again, a heavy sound, along with a creaking, and I knew then what it was.

I glanced through the open doorway at Mama and Jinx. They was looking up, too. That’s because they figured what I had figured.

Someone was on the roof.