by Ninie Hammon
But they was things that come up she hadn’t planned for, couldn’t a’planned for. That Charlie woman, the loudmouth who was gonna be payback to her youngest son for his bad judgement in doing what his mama’d said he couldn’t do.
Then this morning she’d found out … stumbled upon … wouldn’t never in the world have dreamed possible. As she’d sat in the kitchen in the old house in Turkey Neck Hollow looking at that snapshot of Malachi, the world had sorta shifted under her. Like that kaleidoscope thing that rested on that little gold pedestal in the “library” of the Tackett House. Obie’d about made his self go blind looking into it. Viola thought it was right pretty her own self, though it made her uneasy the way you could look at the colored rocks through that little tube and a bunch of mirrors and all you had to do was turn it and the same rocks would look entirely different.
The world had seemed to do a kaleidoscope thing on her earlier today. She’d made Zach drive slow back into town, that picture snug in the pocket of her dress, even though he wanted to zoom fast as he could in that fancy sports car. And she’d thought about the only one of her kids that had ever been worthy of drawing life from her body. Malachi. Tall, strong, handsome, smart Malachi.
Malachi who had gone his own way his whole life, hadn’t never been the obedient boy she’d wanted him to be. Malachi, who’d been lost to her when he come home so damaged from the war … and then soon’s he started to come out of it, he had walked away his own self to take up with them as opposed to her.
Malachi, the last and best of her git.
Only, maybe now he wasn’t that after all. Maybe they was another of her seed, a second chance for her to have the boy she deserved as her son and heir.
All that had been spinning around in her mind when Zach pulled that fancy car to a screeching stop in the driveway of the Tackett House and she seen Neb waddling toward the backyard, carrying Essie in his arms.
And what he told her had burned every other thought out of her head.
Somebody had shot Essie. Shot her!
Viola’d put away the rage at such a blasphemy — an innocent like poor fat Essie who wouldn’t hurt nobody being gunned down — but she’d put that anger away so’s she could care for her daughter. She’d known soon’s she saw her that she was kilt. They was too much blood and shot in the belly like she was. But Viola done everything she could do to save the girl’s life, took her to the only help they was. And then she’d sat with her, was a good mama to her, eased the poor little thing outta this life and into the next one.
Viola still had obligations, kinship obligations. She had to do right by her girl, lay her to rest proper. But not up there in the mountains around Killarney, out there in the cemetery with all them little crosses marking the graves of the others of her children who didn’t even live long enough for her to get to know who they was, what they was like. Essie wasn’t going to join her brothers and sisters in the family cemetery. That was a place where poor people buried their dead and Viola Tackett wasn’t a poor person anymore. She’d put her Essie in a place that befitted a member of the Tackett family. She had already decided where that would be.
That left only getting Essie ready.
She washed her, got her clean, using a sponge and that sweet-smelling soap that was in all the bathrooms in the house. Might be that Essie was cleaner and smelled better dead than she ever had alive. She woulda liked to wash Essie’s hair, but wasn’t no way to do that, there being so much of it. But Viola brushed it until she got out every snarl and tangle, then she braided it in them fat braids that hung down over her shoulders.
Essie didn’t have no nice clothes. Didn’t even own a dress, hadn’t owned one since she was a little girl. She wore them overalls that was easy for her to get into and out of, and tee shirts, and sometimes a baggy sweatshirt in the wintertime, though she never did seem to get too hot nor too cold. She was fine whatever the temperature.
Viola had been gonna wash up the clothes of everybody in the family, in that washing machine down in the basement, dry them in the dryer with them little sheets of good-smelling stuff that was supposed to make them soft. But she hadn’t got ‘round to all that yet, and Essie didn’t have nothing that was clean. So she done all she could do, and it was just fine. She took that pretty lace bedspread off’n Essie’s bed and wrapped her up in it, pinned it around her so’s it almost looked like a dress — a pretty white wedding dress for a girl wouldn’t never have got married. It was fitting she should go to her grave like that.
She’d made the boys stay out of her way downstairs, didn’t even holler to get somebody to come up and help her drag Essie into the bedroom, where she laid out a pretty quilt that’d been on the bed in the room that was now Obie’s. She dragged Essie onto it and folded it around her. They’d take her out tomorrow like that, carry her in that quilt to her final resting place. She’d send Obie and Neb in the morning to make everything ready.
Viola looked down at her daughter. Her face wasn’t no more expressionless in death than it’d been most of the time in life.
And finally … finally, Viola let go of her hold on her rage.
She’d kept it in check, kept hold of it because they was more important things to do, things it was her responsibility to get done and done right. Well, she’d done them.
Now, she sat down on the bed and allowed rage to flow over her in wave after fiery wave. She hadn’t never been mad as she was at that moment. Not one time in her near seven decades of drawing breath, had not ever ached to hurt someone the way she ached to hurt the person who had put a bullet in her poor Essie.
And Viola would do that. She would make them pay. She would spend every last ounce of the strength she possessed on this earth to find who had shot her baby girl and hurt them. Mess them up good!
She’d already set the ball rolling, had got Zach to call that phone tree thing right after they got Essie to the clinic, so wouldn’t be nobody in the county who didn’t know about the “county meeting.”
She’d made sure everybody would show up by promising the one thing that’d bring ‘em all running. Gasoline. She’d instructed Zack to say that all the stories they’d been hearing was true — Viola Tackett had an inexhaustible supply. And she was going to give it out free to anybody who needed some. All they had to do was come to the meeting and put they names on a list. She’d send Zack zipping around the county all morning in his fancy car and Obie in his black pickup, stopping and showing folks their full tanks of gas!
She would gather the whole lot of them on Main Street in front of the school, packed tight, stretched out up and down the street in both directions. Then Viola would tell them the real truth, that they’d been summoned to cough up the person who had murdered her daughter. She'd have her boys and whoever else she could round up stationed all around, armed to catch any runners.
Viola could see in her mind’s eye what she would do. She’d grab the person closest to her, just grab anybody random-like, and she’d put a gun to their head and announce.
“I’m going to count to three, and if don’t nobody tell me who killed my daughter, I’m going to pull the trigger. And I am going to keep shooting people, one after another, until somebody tells me the truth. If I have to shoot every man, woman and child in Nowhere County to get to the person I’m looking for … well, bullets is cheap.”
THE END
What to read next
Bailey Donahue was supposed to stay dead…
After witnessing her husband’s murder, Bailey is ripped from her life and secreted away in the Witness Protection Program. Too bad the sleepy town of Shadow Rock was the wrong place to hide.
Get Through The Canvas here
A Note from the Author
Thank you for reading Blown Away.
If you enjoyed this book, you please consider writing a review on your favorite bookselling site so other readers might enjoy it too. Just a couple of sentences would mean a lot to me.
Thank you!
Ninie Ham
mon
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About the Author
Ninie Hammon (rhymes with shiny, not skinny) grew up in Muleshoe, Texas, got a BA in English and theatre from Texas Tech University and snagged a job as a newspaper reporter. She didn't know a thing about journalism, but her editor said if she could write he could teach her the rest of it and if she couldn't write the rest of it didn't matter. She hung in there for a 25-year career as a journalist. As soon as she figured out that making up the facts was a whole lot more fun than reporting them, she turned to fiction and never looked back.
Ninie now writes suspense--every flavor except pistachio: psychological suspense, inspirational suspense, suspense thrillers, paranormal suspense, suspense mysteries.
In every book she keeps this promise to her Loyal Reader: "I will tell you a story in a distinctive voice you'll always recognize, about people as ordinary as you are--people who have been slammed by something they didn’t sign on for, and now they must fight for their lives. Then smack in the middle of their everyday worlds, those people encounter the unexplainable--and it's always the game-changer."
Also By Ninie Hammon
Nowhere, USA
The Jabberwock
Mad Dog
Trapped
The Hanging Judge
The Witch of Gideon
Blown Away
Through The Canvas Series
Black Water
Red Web
Gold Promise
Blue Tears
The Unexplainable Collection
Five Days in May
Black Sunshine
The Based on True Stories Collection
Home Grown
Sudan
When Butterflies Cry
The Knowing Series
The Knowing
The Deceiving
The Reckoning
The Fault
Stand-alone Psychological Thrillers
The Memory Closet
The Last Safe Place
Nonfiction/Memoir
Typin’ ‘Bout My Generation