November Mourns

Chapter Seventeen

THE CHILDREN CROWDED AROUND HIS BED. The hydrocephalic and the mute, and those with clawlike hands and others who stared at him with big fishy eyes that never blinked. It made him wince, thinking how close he’d come to being kin to these kids. Tandy Mae and her cousin had been damn busy out here in Waynescross, building their family.

Shad lay on a thick goose-feather mattress under heavy blankets. The warmth and comfort drove him down toward sleep. He tried to stay awake but kept fading, his mind tumbling, until a strong male voice he recognized came into the room.

There were three hypodermics first, two in his belly and one in his upper leg. An IV kept popping out of his arm until the fourth try. Then the sewing needle went in and out of his flesh, in and out, all over the place. First his side, then his chest, and now, hell, he was being turned over and they were sewing up his ass.

He felt the splashing of his own blood as it spattered in one direction then dribbled away in another. The stains would never come out of the sheets or the pillows but he knew they wouldn’t throw anything away.

Shad drifted forward and back, and the pain was bad but not nearly as bad as before. He was no longer consumed by despair. The tranquilizers helped. His nerves had tightened. His hands formed into fists and he drove them against the bruised meat of his legs.

He angled aside in bed and saw Doc Bollar sleeping in a chair beside him, his doctor’s bag and a pot of coffee on the floor, the ceiling light on but three of the four bulbs burned out.

Night had fallen and the shimmering sky lapped through the window and across the blankets. The pumpkin-headed kid walked past the open doorway, peeked in, and caught Shad’s eye. The boy eased open the tiny jaws beneath the behemoth skull, and said, “You should sleep.”

Shad did.

He woke with a heavy aching deep in his belly but was mostly numb everywhere else. He tried to move and managed to roll up on one shoulder about three inches. That was it. Craning his neck, he could look over the edge of the bed and see bloody towels and rags on the floor. Unstrung catgut and rubber gloves. Clots of dried mud and moss, shards of glass, thorns and wood splinters.

Doc Bollar had a couple days of white whiskers on his face, and his heavily seamed face was clenched with tension. He hung himself awkwardly in the ladder-back chair as if he was uncomfortable and had piles from sitting in the Lusk outhouse to do his business.

Shad had never seen the man where he didn’t look like he’d just woken up five minutes before and had dressed without a mirror. His thin hair ran into one wild tuft that flapped backwards off his skull like the lid of a silver creamer flipping open. Doc was small and getting smaller every year, hunched with excruciatingly sharp shoulder blades jabbing up at his shirt. Thin except for his feet, which were so large you kept waiting for him to take off his brown clown shoes and show you it was all a joke. It made you think that without those big feet he’d go spiraling out the window like a stuck balloon.

His eyes opened, spun for a second, then immediately focused into a glare. “You know where you are, Shad Jenkins?”

“Yes. How long’s it been?”

“Three days.”

You couldn’t get away from symbolism no matter what you did to yourself.

“Who else is here?” he asked.

“Just Tandy Mae and her kids. I don’t have to tell you about them, do I?”

“No. What about her husband?”

“He run off a few months back.” Doc let out a groan as he shifted in his seat, slumped forward but didn’t stand. “Stop asking fool questions. You need a hospital.”

“What’s the damage?”

“You want to tell me what the hell happened to you first?”

“No.”

It got the old man pissy, made him look around like he wanted to pick up a hammer and smack Shad in the head with it. Instead, he grabbed the cold coffee and let out an exasperated sigh. The smell of curdling milk made Shad wince, and he could feel the thread pull in different spots of his face.

“I stitched you up okay, but your wounds are bad. I can say that you’re probably the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. By all rights you should be dead from the blood loss alone. Bullet passed through a lot of soft tissue, missed your vitals. He must’ve been a fair distance off, whoever done it.” He waited for Shad to respond, and after a minute went on. “Any closer and you’d have been disemboweled. I’m going to have you transferred to Poverhoe City General.”

“No, Doc.”

“I should inform the sheriff-”

“It’s been three days. Tandy Mae didn’t do it already?”

“Apparently you told her not to. You were adamant, slid out of bed and scared her pretty bad. She probably thinks you were running moon and got shot by the federal law.”

“Good.”

“That’s not what happened though?”

“No.”

“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 find 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.”

“No, I think I’ve done about all I can do.”

“Are you leaving?”

“No, I’m going to stay.”

“For a while?”

She tried to keep some hope lit inside, believing that he would achieve something in this world, manage to take her with him despite their past, the baby, everything else.

“Yes, only for a while.”

And there it was, the smile that opened him wide.

She entwined herself around him as tightly as she could and forced him inside her, pulling him deeper, holding him there and clinging even tighter, until some of his wounds began to open. This wasn’t for pleasure or even love. She wanted a child to make up for the one they’d lost. The same way Tandy Mae had wanted a girl to make up for losing Megan. His blood spattered between them.

Afterwards, when she finally released him, Shad fell back on the mattress and wondered if he could’ve gotten away from the hollow if only his father hadn’t called him in prison.

Elfie rubbed her thumb over his knuckles-the nail a heavy cream color in the darkness, and filed very smooth-back and forth just like all the times before, patting him like, Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.

She leaned in to kiss him and her lips were cold, but no colder than his own.

AT DAWN, SHAD HEARD DRUNKEN LAUGHTER OUT IN the brush behind the house and followed the sound. Jake Hapgood squatted beside Becka Dudlow on a tree stump with his hand inside her blouse, stoned out of his mind on meth and moon.

Becka turned her angry teeth on him and started nibbling at his chin, raising tiny welts on his skin. Jake didn’t notice. His hair hung down in his eyes and he tilted his head at Shad without focusing on him. A loose, malicious titter eased from Jake’s throat and kept going on and on, as if he couldn’t stop laughing at himself, couldn’t fully believe he was here. All the slickness was gone.

Shad grabbed Jake by the chin and squeezed hard enough to feel the loose teeth inside his friend’s jaw about to give way in their sick gums. It didn’t surprise him much. The moon gets us all in the end.

He moved a step off and felt a gun barrel pressing into his back.

Preacher Dudlow stood behind him, one hand over his mammoth belly and the other holding the.38 very firmly. No gloves this time, but the man was still sucking at the edges of his mustache.

Well now, Shad thought.

He figured the reverend wasn’t there for him, so he just slid out of the way to the left a little until the barrel was pointing at Becka on the stump. Jake’s hand continued to work vigorously at one breast.

Dudlow didn’t have a coat on but still wore his bright red hunter’s cap with the flaps down over his ears. The knitted scarf his mother had made remained wrapped twice around his throat and trailing over his shoulders, down to his ankles. The aroma of Mrs. Swoozie’s boysenberry pie wafted off Dudlow’s chin.

“We all have our temptations,” Shad said, referencing their last conversation at Megan’s and Mama’s graves. When you threw somebody’s own words back at them they hit much harder than anything you could come up with on your own.

“So true,” Dudlow answered.

Shad tried to remember how it went. “So human of us. It’s a divine test. We’re fated to quarrel with our flaws.”

“I’ve quit fighting,” Dudlow said. “Are you going to try to stop me from what I’m about to do?”

“No,” Shad said, a little surprised at himself. But it was the truth.

“You know where she goes? What she’s been doing?”

“Yes.”

Dudlow pulled a face, showing his purple tongue. “It’s disgraceful. Disgusting. All my fault. I didn’t keep to my own house!”

“Then you can’t blame her completely.”

“No, no, you’re right. You’re quite right about that, yes indeed.”

He handled the gun too easily, without any respect. He turned it one way and the other, as if he was going to hold it up to his eye, peer into it, start thumbing the hammer back-click, click, click… bang! Turn this all into a stupid gag from a French farce. Like he’d wind up with ash on his face, a little cut on his nose, everybody giggling.

Dudlow shifted from foot to foot, sometimes catching the ends of the scarf under his heels.

Shad said, “You told me you weren’t a fool. You said you took your responsibilities in safeguarding your congregation very seriously.”

“I do. I thought-” His mouth worked impotently, and he started bending his knees like a child about to break into a wail.

When it got bad, you always wanted to drop and call for Mama.

“What did you think, Reverend?”

“I thought it would be you.”

“Me?”

“That you were the one primed and set to go off, Shad Jenkins. That you were going to kill and take some of us to hell with you.”

“The only one I want is whoever killed my sister.”

“So you say.”

“We all have our frustrations. Maybe you just need to be a touch more forgiving.”

“Actually, I believe I may prefer being a martyr too much. I’ve known about this for a time, but-I was trapped by my own pride. By the burden of my cross. Of her, my wife.”

“That’s why it’s called a burden, because you have to carry it.”

Jake must’ve pinched a serious amount of Becka’s flesh because she let out a bizarre little yeep noise at that moment and her eyes cleared for an instant. She saw her husband standing there, the pistol trained on her, and an expression of solace filled her face. Dudlow saw it and let loose with a whimper and held the.38 out straight at her face.

“Stop me,” he begged.

“No.”

“I beseech you.”

“No.”

If Shad made a snatch for the gun Dudlow would have the excuse he needed to give himself up to his pain and squeeze the trigger. He wouldn’t feel the pressure of guilt because he’d always be able to throw the blame on Shad’s involvement.

So they had to wait. It didn’t take long. Jake and Becka passed out after a couple of minutes, their heads clunking forward together into something like a maimed kiss. They fell off the tree stump.

Morning mist rose from the ground and plied between their bodies, pressed into a swirl by their ragged breathing and snorting. Dudlow threw down the pistol, let out a manic cry, whirled around, and ran from the thicket.

Shad picked up the.38 and started back to the house, then thought better of it. He should get rid of the pistol, maybe hide it somewhere, but couldn’t think of a proper spot. Peel up floorboards in Mrs. Rhyerson’s attic? Under the porch?

He considered burying it or carrying it down to the river and hurling it in. He’d never even held a handgun before and the compact nature of its power kept drawing his attention.

He turned it one way and the other, as if he was going to hold it up to his eye, peer into it, start thumbing the hammer back-click, click, click…

Finally, he walked back to Jake and Becka and tossed the gun in the same place Dudlow had.

You didn’t always have to have the answers. It was hard enough just keeping the bullet out of your brain.

ELFIE TOOK HIM INTO TOWN AND DROPPED HIM OFF at the end of the road leading to Pa’s house. He leaned over to kiss her good-bye. Although their mouths met with some passion, he couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d gotten whatever she might need from him and there was nothing left. He shut the door and she stomped the pedal getting away. The tires spit dirt across his knees.

Shad slowly walked home. Pa wasn’t there. Wherever he’d gone, he’d taken Lament with him. The ’Stang sat out in front, freshly waxed. Dave Fox must’ve found it weeks ago and had it brought over to Tub Gattling’s shop. This time, Tub hadn’t been able to control himself. The car now had an enhanced carriage and augmented suspension. Tub must’ve been certain that Shad was running moon again. The window had been fixed and Tub’s bill sat on the dashboard. It was reasonable.

The keys were in the ’Stang and he started the engine, listening to it thrum until some of his strength and calm seemed to be returning to him.

Shad shut off the car and moved from it with a heaviness he hadn’t felt when leaving Elfie. On the porch, he was surprised to see that Pa’s chessboard was missing. He stepped into the house. The always loaded shotgun rested in the corner.

He stood in Megan’s empty room for a while before telling her, “I’m sorry.”

Everything he’d done since getting out of the can had been botched right down the line. The snakes were loose. There was blood on his hands. The hollow was getting crazier, and so was he.

Shad looked through Megan’s bedroom again, hunting for any clue. Her clothes, magazines, schoolbooks. Dave Fox had done all this as well. Searched through her things wearing a pair of latex gloves. Inspecting different parts of the house, looking around the yard some. If Dave had found nothing suspicious, what chance did Shad have?

There wasn’t any choice. When you hit the wall you backed up a few steps and ran at it again. Shad checked the floorboards, the back of the closet for secret panels, and the molding around the doors. Teenage girls would have their hiding spots, their special places to keep their treasures. He searched for the pad she’d used down at Tandy Mae’s farm, where she wrote her love poems and notes and set them loose on the river.

He was so careful that it took over two hours to cover every inch of the entire room. He turned up nothing.

A knock at the front door spun him around as if he’d been mule-kicked. The silence of the house had gotten so deeply inside him that he barked Megan’s name. You didn’t know how far you’d gone until something pulled you back a half inch.

Shad opened the door and there stood Dave Fox, dressed as always in his sharply creased gray uniform, with his massive arms hanging at his sides.

“Been looking for you.”

“You already found me, though, didn’t you?”

“I ran into Doc Bollar a week or so ago passed out with his feet in the river. He’s going to get hypothermia that way, you just wait. Frostbite, and he’ll need his feet amputated. Anyway, I prodded him a touch, and in his stupor he mentioned you were at the Patchee place.”

Of course, Dave would know it wasn’t really called the Lusk farm like Shad had always thought. “Were you skulking around up there?”

“A little. Peeked in the windows some. Since he didn’t know anything except that you’d been shot, and since you weren’t going anywhere and appeared to be recovering, I let it go.”

Dave Fox drew his line in the sand and kicked the shit out of everybody to one side and let everyone on the other side slide. “Thanks.”

“He kept calling you the luckiest son of a bitch ever, the way the bullet missed all your internal goodies. I figured you’d show up at Mrs. Rhyerson’s when you were ready.”

“So you watched her place and spotted me there last night.”

“On my night patrol. I didn’t want to ruin your reunion with Elfie Dansforth, so I didn’t bother you then.”

“You waited until now. Don’t you ever sleep?”

“No.” Dave shifted, and the porch slats creaked beneath his weight. “I thought we could chat.”

“Come in and pull up a chair.”

Dave didn’t sit. Shad felt compelled to stand and face the deputy despite the weariness settled heavily in Shad’s shoulders. Dave saw the exhaustion in him and put a wide hand on Shad’s chest and pressed him back until he was seated on the couch.

“Goddamn Doc,” Dave said. “He should have insisted you go to a hospital.”

“He did.”

“Then he should’ve come got me or the sheriff.”

“Doc wanted to.”

“And you’re the damn fool who talked him out of it.”

“You’re going to hurt my feelings soon.”

“To hell with that. Red and Lottie Sublett suffered through a couple of weeks of guilt, then came down into town. They thought their eldest boy had shot you and you crawled off into the woods to die. That weirdo kid had them half-convinced you were an FBI agent and the bureau was planning a full-scale attack on Red’s still. That what happened?”

“No, I’m not an undercover Fed,” Shad said.

“I mean about him shooting you.”

“No, Osgood missed.”

With the gun belt rasping, Dave did a slow turn, his gaze steely, making sure Shad realized this was a serious moment. “We’re not going to play it this way. None of this going around in circles showing how cute and witty you are. Out with it. The snake handlers do this?”

“No.”

“All of them up there, they live the same way. They’re disassociated. They think killing a man is no different than skinning a hare.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

Not exactly, but how was he going to explain it? You could only go so far with the truth before you had to talk about Hellfire Christ. And the ghost of your mother. And the fact that you had killed a man with your bare hands.

“I think you’re lying to me,” Dave said. “And I haven’t heard a whisper of what actually happened.”

“You going to take me in for getting shot?”

“It’s a crime not to report it.”

But Dave wouldn’t play it that way, dragging Shad into Increase Wintel’s office for something so crappy. Not the guy who’d broken up the Boxcars ring in Okra County in two hours, all on his own. Killing three men and the madam, shot twice in the thigh by a.22, and not slowing up a step.

“Was she smiling?” Shad asked.

It almost made Dave frown. “What’s this?”

Maybe it was Shad’s enunciation. He was always repeating himself, so maybe he wasn’t speaking clearly enough. Right now, his tongue felt too large and sharp for his mouth. He had to sound the words out slow and carefully, the way he used to make Tushie Kline do it. “Was… she… smiling?”

“Are you talking about Megan?”

“I want to see her.”

“Shad Jenkins, she’s been buried for-”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I want to see a picture. You cops must’ve taken plenty of photos, even if it was a death by misadventure. I need to know if she was smiling.”

Turning his back, Dave Fox shambled across the room for the door. “You can live without knowing something like that. I’m going to pay my respects to Megan and your ma. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Use the time to reflect on how you want this to play out.”

“Sure.”

Shad got up and watched Dave walk down the road and up the knoll toward the graves. Pa would have Megan’s unfinished headstone somewhere out back, where he poured his pain and misgivings and loneliness into each blow of the chisel. If you cut your grief and anguish into something from the earth, would it be taken away? Or did it just taint the world around you with human weakness?

Maybe both.

Shad moved to his old bedroom, sat on the bed ready to stretch out, and heard an odd crinkling beneath the sheets. His breath caught.

He drew back the comforter and there, laid out on his pillow, was a sheet of lined paper.

He recognized Megan’s handwriting and suddenly the sweat rose and began writhing across his face.

I love you but I can’t have you. I will not give this letter to the wind or the water. You won’t have it. I’ll take it home and hide it where you’ll never find it. If you take me into darkness, I’ll still love you, but you know you’ll pay a price. This letter is my heart, and my heart will remain mine, no matter what happens next.

Oh Mags.

He was trembling so hard that the page tore down the middle.

Jesus Christ, she left it here for me on my own bed, and I never even checked.

That’s all she’d wanted him to do since he’d come back home. Just to look in his room.

He had to hold the two sections of paper back together.

We’re not what we choose to be, David. We’re chosen. You by God, and I by you.

David.

Oh.

So look at that, he was here all the time.

Of course he was. And he’s behind you right now. His breath is colder than the flesh of your sister, and the shotgun’s in the other room.

Shad didn’t even have the one small chance he’d been banking on. He would turn and throw everything he had into one swing aimed directly for the point of Dave’s chin, and Dave would be a step ahead of him and watch the fist approach much too slowly, and he would catch Shad’s wrist in his huge hand, pull him close into the crook of his powerful arm, and put a hammerlock on Shad’s throat until the blood squeezed out from the indent of his eyes. He wasn’t going to make it but there was nothing left to do.

“Don’t try it,” Dave said softly, so very far ahead of him.

Shad turned around and Dave Fox was there, staring at the note in his hand. This was it, the final act he’d been waiting for, and it wasn’t going to play out anything like he’d been hoping. He dropped the two pieces of paper and they dipped and twirled to the floor.

Always a mile behind. He stared at Dave’s chest and imagined Megan in those arms, leaning up to kiss the deputy’s lips and catching her cheek against the curved edge of the badge pinned there.

That’s where the scratch came from.

“What happened, Dave?” Shad asked. All the rage had fled now that he needed it most. His voice was hardly more than a whine. He had to lean on the corner post of the headboard to keep from going over. “Why did you kill my baby sister?”

“I didn’t. But I couldn’t save her either,” Dave admitted casually. “The hills use my body on occasion, to take what they want.”

“Then why do you look so guilty, Dave, if it’s not your fault?”

Dave didn’t look guilty in the slightest and he knew it. “I fight but I fail. This is who I am, the purpose given to me. I was chosen.”

“By what?”

“I don’t know.”

Shad’s knees were ready to give and he had to lean more heavily on the perfectly sanded wood of the bed his father had made. It was so smooth it felt like he might fall through it like fog.

“And you chose Mags. Why?”

Rising to his full height, Dave crossed his arms across his broad chest and seemed to fill the entire room with his power and righteousness. Through his tears, Shad had trouble seeing him. It was like staring into the sun.

“Because she was special,” Dave told him. “She had to be taken back to the land. She’ll return again soon. They all will.”

“All of them?” Shad asked. “How many?”

But Dave Fox wouldn’t answer.

“So that means you’re a wraith? Something that comes out of the gorge and plays with the little girls, then bites into them.”

“It’s not like that. I’m a part of the current, the same as all hollow folk. I’m just different.” Then, dropping his voice, and giving Shad the killer eye. “Even from you.”

“You knew I was going up Gospel Trail Road. Were you there when I met the Gabriels?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the one they were waiting for.”

“Yes.”

“The one Jerilyn was writing to, sending letters on the creek.”

“I can read them that way. I was in the woods, watching the snake gathering.”

“Why?”

“I thought I could help you,” Dave said.

“Help me to do what? All I wanted was to find my sister’s killer!”

Still with the questions. Trying to find your way from one end of the bitter confusion to the other. Shad hated himself for even talking. He should be fighting, running for the shotgun. Take another bullet in the back if need be, but he should be doing something.

“Help you to finish walking the road.” Dave paused, finding the right words to use, like he was talking to an ill child. “You’re already different than when you first got back to town, Shad. You must know that. We’re all in a state of… incompletion. Every one of us except the dead.”

So now it was about resurrection.

“Why didn’t you let the Weggs kill me off? If it’s all about sacrificing our lives to the hollow?”

“It’s not. Only favored folk, at certain times. If I’d let them kill you, it would’ve been murder, and why would I go and do a fool thing like that? You’re my friend.”

Shad let out a little chuckle of malice. “Who’ve you got your eyes on next? Who’s the next special person?”

“You need to stop asking questions if you don’t want the answers. Don’t be in a rush to judge. You’ve got blood on your hands now too.”

“You think it’s the same?” Shad shouted. “Murdering teenage girls and taking out some guy coming at you with a shotgun?” Thinking about Howell Wegg’s throat made Shad even more ill. Now, when he needed it, the fire in his skull had deserted him. “I should’ve figured it out. You told me you’d met with some of those snake church folks.”

“Yes.”

“I mentioned your name to Lucas Gabriel. I asked him to call the sheriff’s office and get you and Increase Wintel up there. I mentioned your name. He said he had no need for Moon Run Hollow outsiders. He told me he didn’t know you.”

“He doesn’t. Not with this face.”

“I mean, I should’ve realized it then.”

Dave’s expression grew more disappointed. “You’re a terrible detective, you know that, Shad Jenkins? I said that I’d run into a couple of them snake handlers now and again. I never said I’d met Lucas Gabriel. You didn’t catch me in a lie. I don’t lie.”

Shad grimaced and let out a groan. Okay, he already knew he wasn’t cut out for this private investigator shit.

“That day you searched Megan’s room wearing your little latex gloves. You were looking for this letter, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Dave said. “She didn’t send it to me but she read it aloud. I heard her.”

It was kind of a relief knowing you weren’t the only lunatic in the room.

“You looked high and low and didn’t check my room?”

“It was an oversight.”

So Dave Fox did make mistakes. He did have a weakness. He wasn’t infallible.

“I don’t lie, Shad. Once you accept that, you’ll begin embracing the truth about yourself.”

“You terrified Lucas Gabriel. He actually wanted you to have his daughters.”

“And so I took one. But I didn’t frighten him. He loved me. He still does even now. The same way he loves the rattlers. I came to him crawling on my belly through the thorns, with the face of a snake.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Because a serpent is as much a part of Eden and man’s nature as anything else. Through our pain and forbearance we grow closer to paradise.”

It made Shad snarl with impotence. How many people would be alive if only he’d spent his first night in the hollow back in his own bed? He counted three, and who knew how many others were lying out in the woods?

“How do you kill them? Hold your hand over their faces? Suffocate them? Did you press your mouth over theirs so they couldn’t breathe?”

“You’ll understand eventually.”

“Is that why their lips are always screwed into a smile and there wasn’t a mark on them?”

“They smile because they’re happy. Fulfilled.”

“You stole Jerilyn right out from beneath me.”

“No, Shad,” Dave Fox said, and his voice was filled with as much honesty as you’d ever heard in one man before. “You let me have her.”

“What?”

“You helped me. Then you wrote yourself a note in the dust.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. You’ve probably written yourself other messages too, thinking they were from someone else. The hollow uses your body as well, to give them whatever they want.”

“Like hell!”

But you couldn’t argue when you were starting to believe a little. It was no more insane than talking to your dead Mama or seeing your murdered sister’s hand wherever you went. Chatting it up with the devil dressed in the warden’s finest suit and silk tie. Finding old beer bottles with notes in them written for you. Really, even at a moment like this, you couldn’t be that much of a hypocrite.

His mother had told him that they would take him.

She’d said there was someone in the hills who could demonstrate his belief on his belly. Who manifested nothing but poison. One of Mama’s prophecies had finally come true. Or perhaps Shad had suspected Dave all along, because they were so much like alike. Was that the joke here? Were they simply two schizophrenics trying to find common ground?

Dave Fox didn’t think he was human. Just another ill child with a sick brain, born or made into something that wasn’t quite right. Another damned part of the hollow like all the plague victims they’d brought up Gospel Trail and left there to become dust sifting into the river. The earth and water had gone bad. The flesh had gone wild.

You had to keep them talking. In the morality plays this was the scene where all the revelations were made right before the clouds parted and God came down in his wicker basket on a rope and solved all your problems.

“Why is it you’ve never shown yourself before, Dave? The real you.”

“I have many faces. Some are unfinished.”

“You’ve only got one, Dave. I’ve only seen you with one.”

“The one I wear now I show only to you. Nobody else but you.”

“You’re cracked. It’s the moon. The moon’s done it to us. It’s poisoned us. We’re all brain-damaged from it.”

“We’re changing on the road. It’s the way the hollow needs it to be.”

He tried to raise his voice above Dave’s but he didn’t have the strength. “That’s why there’s so many ill children being born. The dying gene pool. The diseased bodies thrown into the river and sinking into the ground. Into our food. Into the corn and the mash. We’re all monstrosities. But everything you did, you did on your own. You chose Megan.”

“She was favored.”

With his vision swimming, Shad bent and retrieved the sheet of paper and held it out before him. “She said you chose her, David. You. You think you’re a slave to the woods? To the road?”

“To my nature,” Dave admitted. “Same as you are to your own. That’s why you lay with both the Gabriel girls. Because it’s natural to perpetuate with your own kind. You’re no less a hostage than me or anyone. You gave Jerilyn to me, Shad. She was mine and Rebi was yours.”

“I didn’t kill Rebi.”

“Didn’t you?”

Being a jonah didn’t make you a murderer, but Dave was so damn sure of himself. “Ever think you’ve just gone insane?”

Dave Fox, for the first time since Shad had known him, hesitated. His mouth worked and formed a word or two, and a subtle ripple passed over his face. “No.”

“I’ve got to stop you,” Shad said.

“Don’t you think I’ve already tried to end it?”

He grabbed Shad by the throat, hauled him off the floor, and pinned him to the wall without any effort. Shad let out a cry and struggled vainly. Dave wasn’t even straining and Shad couldn’t breathe. “I don’t want it to be this way, but this is our world. You think I like doing this? The hollow won’t let me die.”

You could never beat someone as powerful as this.

Using all his strength, he tried to pry Dave’s fingers from his neck but couldn’t move him an inch. He was suffocating and in his terror strained even more, kicking out now, trying to scream. Nothing helped. Dave pulled Shad’s body forward and thrust him into the wall. Battering him once, twice, and again until the crossbeams splintered and Shad gave up any resistance.

Oh Mama. Oh Megan. He’s gonna plant one on me and I’m going to the grave a grinning idiot.

“Your eyes are closed,” Dave said. “Open them.”

Shad did, the blood flowing from his nose and mouth, down the back of his throat. There was smashed plaster on his face, in his hair, all over the floor. Dave really had put him through the wall, then yanked him out again. This wasn’t going to be like the other times. They were going to know he’d been in a fight.

Then, with an extraordinary amount of gentleness, Dave Fox laid Shad on the bed.

“I told you,” he said. “You’re my friend.”

That rasp of leather filled the room as Dave drew his.38 from the holster and held it to his own temple. “No matter what I do it never stops. I tried to kill myself for years before I understood and accepted my purpose. I’m theirs, same as you are. I get by all right bearing my sins, and you will too.”

Look at this, look at what you have to do now. You’ve got to try to stop the guy.

Shad reached out but there was a hideous tearing in his stomach as the opened wound ripped wider. His voice was barely a whisper. “No. Listen-”

“Watch and learn, Shad Jenkins.”

Dave Fox, slave to the hollow and all the back hills, derailed by corn mash moonshine and mutated plagues deep inside his chromosomes, and maybe something more, gave the same smile that had branded the lips of his victims, pulled the trigger, and blasted the top third of his head off.

Chapter Nineteen

ON BOGAN ROAD, THE BULLFROGS CRAWLED out of the pond and tried to make it over the wire grass. It cut them to pieces but they kept staggering and hopping forward until their bellies were sliced open. They roared and staggered on with their guts dangling loose. Some turned back but they couldn’t make it to the water.

Pa was building coffins. One of the four Luvell shacks covered in crow shit had been torn down, and Shad’s father had carefully stacked the lumber up in the yard. He’d used the wood to complete one coffin already and was busy at work on a second. Lament sat nearby, sluggishly wagging his tail.

Mags’s hand was on Pa’s neck. Now she was reaching up to stroke his face.

You weren’t finished yet and might never be.

When you learned so much all at once, it was worse than never knowing anything at all. And you had no one left to blame except for yourself.

Glide moved about the area, working the vats of bubbling gruel, wearing heavier clothing and checking the sky. She wouldn’t remember the last time it had snowed in Moon Run, and you could tell she was a little frightened. She circled the steaming drums with a lot less wriggle today, and her cheeks were red with windburn.

As he watched, Glide slipped over to his father and gave the old man a peck on the chin. They embraced and kissed and his pa said something that made her laugh.

Shad thought, Well, there’s something.

When Glide returned to the vats, Shad straggled forward. It felt like something had given way in the small of his back. His stitches were loose but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. He limped toward Glide. He had to admit, the smell of the boiling whiskey made him feel a bit better.

“Haven’t seen you for a spell,” she said. “You hurt? Why you walking so odd? Is that blood in your hair?”

Shad tried to form a response but could only stare.

“What’s this look on your face? You didn’t know about me and your pa?”

“No.”

“What’s that?”

He coughed and spit bloody phlegm. His throat burned badly and his voice had a rough, grating squeak to it. “I said no.”

“You sound funny. I would’ve thought he’d have told you about that by now. He asked me to marry him.”

Yes, you might’ve thought your father would tell you something like that. That you had a seventeen-year-old new mom. It might make for a good topic of conversation. “When did he propose?”

“A day or two after the last time you was here.”

Before he’d gone up Gospel Trail Road.

“Did you agree?”

“A ’course,” she said, like she found it odd he was even asking.

“Why’s my father making coffins?”

“Well, Venn’s dead. That’s who the big one is for. I’m not sure about the others. Maybe he’s going to sell them.”

So that’s the way it was getting now, when you could just drop the fact that your own brother was dead without even a note of sorrow. “What happened to Venn?”

“Dunno. Think his brain just rusted in place until it stopped telling his heart and lungs to work. He didn’t suffer none.”

It made Shad think about the scene this morning again, with Jake and Becka Dudlow on the stump out back of Mrs. Rhyerson’s. “Where’s Hoober?”

“Don’t know that either. Ain’t nobody seen him in over a month. Maybe he left the hollow.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You might be right at that.”

Karl Jenkins crouched near M’am’s front door, hammering at the lumber. His craggy features were fixed with intent, and his deep-set eyes had glazed a bit, the melancholia sort of just rattling around in there. The terrible grace and brutal force within him was barely constrained, and Pa’s lips were scabbed from where he’d been chewing them. Or from where Glide had been gnawing on him.

His father didn’t look up at him.

“Hello, Pa.”

“Hello, son.”

“Dave Fox is dead in our house.”

Pa didn’t appear to be surprised, and kept working with the wood.

“You already knew that, didn’t you? Is that who you’re building this coffin for?”

His father said, “Venn passed on a few days back. They got his body wrapped in the barn. Nobody’s seen Hoober in so long that they’re fearing he’s come to an awful end too.”

But Shad was certain that his father already knew Dave was lying spattered across the bedroom, a few feet from Mags’s last love letter to him.

“Who told you about Dave Fox? Was it Megan? Or did you find a note scuffed in the dirt?”

“You’re talking foolish now, Shad. I’ll hear no more a’that.”

“Or was it Dave himself, Pa? Did Dave come by and tell you he blew his brains out in front of me?”

But Dave wasn’t dead. You didn’t live in the hollow, and you couldn’t die in it either.

“Shad, you’ve gone a little sick, son. That’s what happens when you head up the bad road into them woods. You need to go inside and talk with M’am. She’s gonna help you.”

“Will she?”

“Go on now.”

His father dismissing him was both comforting and insulting. He wanted to shout at Pa and explain how he’d committed murder with his own hands. But Tandy Mae had been right. Once his father had made his peace with Shad going up into the hills, he’d considered his son lost to him. It was an act of will. The same way it took incredible resolve for Pa to ignore Megan’s hand pressing across his cheek.

“I’ve still got more to say to you.”

“I don’t wanna talk no more right now, son. Go on inside.”

Shad realized his father was silently sobbing, the man’s shoulders quivering. It should have startled him but somehow it didn’t. “You were right, Pa. That the dead don’t rest in the hollow.”

His father’s strong palm came up and flattened against Shad’s belly. It came away red and wet. Tears tracked his cheeks. “You’re bleeding, son. Please go on inside now, she’ll help with that too.”

“Sure. Congratulations on the new bride.”

You couldn’t do anything except follow the course laid out in front of you. Megan had been right. You didn’t choose, you were chosen.

Shad stepped to M’am Luvell’s ramshackle pineboard door and tapped as the walls creaked and scraped together, tilting worse than before. His knuckles came away stained with wet moss. If the shack went over, it would crush his father.

The dying bullfrogs continued to roar and scream.

M’am’s voice, dangerous and without the quaint mischief, slid out through the slats like a fishing blade. “Shad Jenkins, you just-”

He didn’t like her tone and walked in without waiting to hear her bidding. The place had lost the hallowed essence that he’d sensed before. The stink of marijuana filled the room. His skin grew clammy and he began to cough uncontrollably. After a minute he checked the window and saw the first patterns of snow emerging in the sky.

Huddled in her chair, M’am Luvell sat wearing only a silk slip, smoking her pipe. The hex woman was sweating even as the temperature dropped. It made him giggle and shake his head. You couldn’t get away from the backass contradictions of this town.

Beside her, set on a table his father had built, stood the old man’s chessboard. They were in midgame, which might have taken days or weeks.

Uncovered from all her sweaters and blankets, M’am’s dwarf body still showed that timeless quality she had. She looked as much like a girl as she did a hag, and the ambiguity struck him as something curious and creepy and very funny.

“You see more of my bare flesh and you get the giggles, boy? Another lady would be shamed and disgraced.”

“But not you.”

It made her cackle. Threads of smoke clung to her teeth. “Take a sight more than that, I reckon.”

“So do I, especially since I wasn’t laughing at you.”

“But you were. At the fact that I get me the sweats in weather like this. I guess it is a sight.”

Like there was nothing else to talk about than how fascinating a seminude dwarf witchy woman might be.

“You made it back alive,” she said. “You should be proud of that. Not many people go up the bad road and come back again. People like us, that is.”

“And who are the people like us?” he asked.

“Those who got special consideration under the Lord.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Sit on the bed. I’m gonna care for your wounds.”

She clambered down from her seat and moved about the shack, so small and familiar with the place that even at her age she somehow managed to scurry. More like a small animal skittering around the place, like something you’d chase after with a broom and set traps for.

He lay back on the bed and watched her brew tea. For a few minutes he slept, and when he woke she had cleaned his belly and the cuts on his scalp. She’d wrapped a cloth around his neck soaked in a cooling fluid. The tea tasted worse than he would’ve guessed but he immediately felt more alert.

After he sat up, she immediately returned to her seat and began smoking again.

“I heard what you said outside,” she told him. “Don’t you worry none on the death of your friend. It’s December. It’s a time meant for dying.”

“So why didn’t I?”

“Considering the size of the bruises on your throat and the hole in your guts, you’re lucky you didn’t. Then again, December ain’t over just yet.” She let out a spurt of cackling that went on for too long.

“I thought you were supposed to ease my mind.”

“I can only do so much.”

“Well, feel free to start whenever you like.”

“She’s with child,” M’am Luvell said, her forehead misted with perspiration. “Your woman, if that’s who she be. That Elfie Danforth.”

It got the heat flowing back through his veins again, and the rage that had abandoned him bucked once, like an engine trying to turn over.

Was this all he was good for? Being baited and toyed with? To what goddamn end? “And you learned that when I was with her only last night?”

M’am sucked on the pipe loudly, holding the smoke in her lungs until her lips fluttered, then letting it out. “Oh, the baby ain’t yours. She been with a lot of other fellas since you been away. I don’t rightly think she knows who the daddy is. But her mama come in here to get some Black Haw jam, and that takes the morning sickness off.”

Now Elfie and her Ma could sit back together on their Uninterrupted Airflow Pillows late at night and order off the shopping channel. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.

“Even if it’s true, why are you telling me?”

“You mentioned her while you slept. It weighs on your mind that you might have a child born in the hollow. But that baby, it’s a girl, she won’t be yours.”

He let out a long sigh and drew the chill rag from around his neck. “Did you really think that would make me feel better?”

“Boy, it’s my aim to get you on to where you need to go, not to make you spin cartwheels for joy. Did you find what you were after on Gospel Trail Road?”

“No.”

“Then you ain’t done with what you got to do.”

“I know that.”

“You might never be.”

Shad stared at her. “Old woman, are you ever going to tell me anything helpful?”

M’am Luvell tilted her chin and considered on that for a while, nodding as the smoke writhed in the air. “I reckon not.”

“Then shut the hell up!”

“It’s only gonna get worse for you now.”

“You’re as crazy as the rest of them.”

She broke into that wild laughter again that sounded like bones clashing and crushing together, and even after he walked from the shack past his father and the girl, with Lament now loping beside him, the noise followed and managed to drown out the shrieking croaks of the deranged, dying bullfrogs.

THE ’STANG WAS ALL YOU COULD COUNT ON.

He drove into the mountains with Lament in the passenger seat, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness. Where Dave Fox had gingerly placed it after killing her, leaving Megan there alone for hours while he drove around the town as if searching for her.

It began to snow.

He could feel the breath of the two dead guys in the backseat on his hackles. Lament felt it too and started giving sidelong glances, snapping at emptiness.

When Shad parked, Lament hopped out and gazed north along the trail. It took a while for Shad to limp that far. They hiked up and stood where the wagons had unloaded families dying from cholera and yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung from the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life.

You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear.

The dead knew something about life that the living didn’t. They knew how it ended.

Lament chased the snowflakes and rolled happily in the mud. He kept trying to get Shad to chase him. Slowly they worked up the rise toward the dense oak and slash pine, with the willows bowing to the ground, beaten in the crosswinds coming across the precipice.

The woods continued to close in as they walked. They finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail Road.

Thousands of feet below, the Chatalaha River boiled at the bottom of the gorge.

Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. You did what you could to stay sane and strong from one moment to the next, but it was never quite enough.

“Where’s my story going now?” Shad asked, and Lament began to whine and nervously turn in circles.

The movement beneath the turnings of the world climbed toward him. Something reached for Shad’s ankle, tightened on him, and began to yank him down. He wondered if he was strong enough to resist. He held for a moment, then started to slide over the edge. It felt powerful enough to be Dave’s fist.

The suicides didn’t sleep. Lament barked and lunged and squealed. Shad grabbed for the dog. We have to save our Laments, they’re the only ones alive who still care for us. Wraiths bit into his legs. His lower back gave way again and the pain made him cry out. He slid farther to the rim, went to one knee, and the wind brought a burst of snow up into his face.

Lament’s howling made a sob break from his chest, and he nearly went over. The moon, he thought, this might only be the moon and the sickness in your mind. Behind him, Megan’s hand appeared and flashed out to grip his wrist, trying to pull him back up, as the snow thrashed and outlined the rising, reaching forms all around, and he waited to see where the fight would go from here.