by Ninie Hammon
The original black stickpins that’d been in the map were gone. But there were new ones to take their place. Starting on the left side, the pins spelled out two words. A name: Stuart McClintock.
Chapter Fourteen
Shepherd Clayton’s mama had reamed him out good. She hadn’t unloaded a come-to-Jesus like that on him since he was fifteen and him and Jim Bob Claywell got drunk, went joyriding on the McGintys’ Farmall tractor and run it off into the creek. She’d laid him out for not staying home with Cody. She’d gone on and on about how his son needed him, and how he wasn’t living up to his responsibilities as a father sitting in this old house day after day while others took care of his baby boy.
She’d said the same thing before, but she got on a roll this morning, said she wasn’t gonna carry him over to him and Abby’s place like she and the others had been doing, that he needed to stay where he was and look after his boy. So he’d took out walking. It was fifteen miles from his folks’ house on Oldham Pike in Beaufort County to him and Abby’s place at the end of the dirt road off Sawmill Lane in Nower County and it’d a took him all day to get there. He knew his mama wouldn’t let him walk all that way and sure enough she come along after a while and give him a lift, but took up where she’d left off, flat out would not let it be. She said she and his daddy was real disappointed in him — and his daddy with MS and all. That hurt his feelings. She said his whole family was upset with him, particularly his sisters Clarice and Loretta, the ones that was taking care of Cody. They had they own kids to raise, his mama said, had plenty on their plates already ‘thout him dumping his newborn on them and expecting them to look after him. Cody being so little and all it was a handful and he didn’t have no right to palm it off on somebody else.
She kept at it, but he didn’t say nothing. Wasn’t no way to explain. She’d never understand the truth of it. Shep was home. This was his home, his and Abby’s and Cody’s. He was here with Abby and soon’s things was made right, they’d all be here, him and Abby and Cody, all here in the house Abby’d come home to fix up the night before Cody’d been released from the hospital.
When Shep didn’t never respond, his mama finally give up and left and he was powerful glad of it because with her jawing in his ear he couldn’t hear Abby. Soon’s he was alone in the house, he could hear her clear. In the beginning, it had been hard to pick her voice out of the whispers in the house. It’d got easier every day, until now it was just like she was sitting right here beside him, her talking in that voice that always reminded him of a little bird chirping — just like if they was back in life the way it used to be and she was sitting in the rocker nursing little Cody the way he’d dreamed of seeing her so many times he could close his eyes and make it real. In fact, in the last couple of days, he hadn’t had to concentrate at all to hear her. But now, it wasn’t like she was sitting beside him. It was more like she was inside his head and he didn’t hear no “voice” at all.
In her not-voice that didn’t sound like anybody at all, she told him about the world and what was going on in it that he didn’t know about, things she knew about because … because she just knew, that’s all.
He listened when she told him there was things he needed to do. At first, when she was still sitting beside him instead of talking inside his head, it was just conversation, suggestions like: Shep, don’t you think it’d be a good idea to see what it is that fella is up to, the one that come by here looking for his wife, Thelma?
He’d allowed that they was lots of people looking for other people — everybody in Nower County was gone.
But she’d said that one fella was different — nosier than the rest.
Of course, she’d been right! He’d come back last night, brought that big guy with him. Shep didn’t need Abby to tell him them fellas wasn’t up to no good. Their kind never was. Abby told him the big one was married to a white woman so wasn’t no telling what other evil he might be spawning. She told Shep what he needed to do about it and he’d do whatever she wanted because she was there inside him, directing him and—
“Yo Shep,” someone said, and he liked to jumped out of his skin because wasn’t nobody but him ever come by here, except his mama and she’d done come and gone for the day. He looked up at the door, which wasn’t no proper door, of course, just a hole in the wall where there had been a door before the house … got old. He thought of it that way. The house got old after he come home to it and Abby wasn’t there.
There was a man standing in the not-door, looking in at him where he sat in the lawn chair. He didn’t know the man—
“It’s me, Claude. I know I changed a lot but it pains me that my own kin don’t know who I am no more.”
Claude Letcher. Abby’s oldest brother. And if he hadn’t told Shep who he was Shep wouldn’t never have guessed it. Hadn’t nobody in the family seen Claude in … what, ten years, maybe more’n that. He run off to the city when he was a teenager and got in all kinda trouble the family didn’t like to talk about but Abby told him that he’d got to using drugs and selling them and other stuff just as bad.
Last he had heard of Claude was they’d locked him up somewhere in a mental hospital because they’d decided he wasn’t sane enough to stand trial for the murder of his two roommates. Folks said he’d hacked them into little bitty pieces with a rusty hatchet when he was high on some drug or another, but apparently the drugs wasn’t all. They’d said he had other mental problems, stuff wrong with him that didn’t have nothing to do with drugs, but the drugs made it all worse.
He always had been odd and odd had over time turned into peculiar in a bad way and after a while the family was … say the truth of it, scared to be around him. Wasn’t nobody shed no tears when they heard he’d been locked away. Abby was the youngest and she didn’t hardly have no memories of Claude, he’d been gone so long.
“Yo, Claude,” Shep said. Didn’t get up or nothing. Wasn’t no place to ask him to have a seat and Shep wouldn’t have been inclined to offer him one if there had been. Shep was … what? Strange that now was the first time he’d noticed it. Shep was on the sidelines. Didn’t seem to be up to him no more what he said or didn’t say, nor what he done. Abby was the one deciding things now. The Abby that was in his head who didn’t have Abby’s bird-chirp voice.
Claude didn’t seem to take offense at Shep’s lack of a welcome. He just ducked his head and stepped through the hole in the wall, walked over to Shep and sat down in the dirt next to him.
He wasn’t a big man, but he had always seemed big to Shep because there was an air of menace always hanging over him that made him appear bigger than he was. It was like he was one of them hand grenades you seen in the movies and he’d already removed that pin thing, grabbed that little circle with a piece of metal on the end with his teeth and yanked it out and was just holding onto the handle. And wouldn’t take nothing at all, just the slightest provocation and Claude’d let go that handle and explode all over you and everybody else in the room.
He was covered in tattoos, most of them prison tats by somebody who couldn’t draw. Wasn’t a bare piece of skin anywhere Shep could see, except on his face, but there was skulls and daggers and such all tangled up together like a vine going up his neck to his chin.
His teeth was black stumps. But his eyes … Shep looked into his eyes and they was Abby’s eyes, same color blue as hers, same dark eyelashes that made them stand out on his face.
“Won’t nobody tell me what’s goin’ on.” Claude spit out a splatter of tobacco juice. “But it’s clear ain’t nothing right.”
“How’d you get out? I thought you’s locked away for good.” Shep was a little surprised his own self that he’d said something that forward and blunt.
Claude didn’t seem to take offense, in fact it seemed like he warmed up to Shep because of it.
“Ain’t rightly sure. My neighbors as was gonna testify made themselves a meth lab that blew up, killed half a dozen of them and then they wasn’t no witnesses no more. Something like that. So
they let me out and I come home … where is everybody?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Don’t nobody know for sure.”
“Why’d they leave?”
“Don’t nobody know that neither.”
Claude sat back and looked Shep up and down.
“Then what do you know?”
Abby started talking to Claude then outta Shep’s mouth, told him all kinda things Shep didn’t know about what had happened and why. And who was responsible. And what they’d ought to do about it. Claude and Shep both soaked up every word.
Chapter Fifteen
Viola walked slowly from one room to the next in the Nower house — her house, now. Just looking, soaking it all up. She’d parked Essie in the rocking chair on the front porch and give her the old Barbie doll missing a leg that she hauled around with her everywhere. She’d be content to play with it for hours.
She was glad Neb, Obie and Zach hadn’t got back yet. She didn’t want them underfoot. They couldn’t appreciate it, didn’t know how to want things fine as these. They was just glad of indoor plumbing.
Malachi was the only one who’d know what a wonder it was, but she hadn’t seen the boy in a couple a days and soon’s she located him, she and him was going to have to have a Come-to-Jesus meeting. If it was true he’d cast his lot with Sam Sheridan and that prissy showoff — what was her name, Sylvia Ryan’s youngest. Charlene. Viola very much did not like that young woman, they was challenge in them eyes and wasn’t likely she was going to take to all that Viola had in mind. They was gonna butt heads, Viola was sure of it and hadn’t never been a single time in her near seventy years on this earth that Viola Tackett butted heads with somebody and didn’t leave them with they heads busted open. This one wouldn’t be no different, but Viola had to have herself a talk with her youngest son, first.
Not now, though. She didn’t want to do a single thing but wander around the castle that was now hers. On the first floor, then up to the second and then the third. Around and around she went.
The house was broke out with windows, big tall ones. Ceilings was probably sixteen feet and the windows was twelve — tall and thin, with sheer white curtains between the heavy velvet drapes, and the tops of all the windows was rounded, like the doorways that was archways from one big room into the next.
She remembered them sheers from when she was a little girl and tried to get a peek into the house, how she couldn’t see anything but blurred shapes ‘cause she was looking through that gauzy stuff. She went to one of the four bay windows on the front of the house, pulled the sheers back to let in the sun, meant to open them all up … but then she didn’t. She let the sheers fall back into place. She wasn’t on the outside looking in no more. She was on the inside looking out and now she was the one didn’t want a bunch of nosey, prying eyes looking in on what she was doing.
She stood for so long staring at the crystal chandelier that hung over the cherry table in the dining room that she totally lost track of time. The room had red walls. They was an archway between the foyer and the dining room, and it had decorative spindles lined up at the top of it that was the same as the spindles in the staircase and the ones on the front porch railing. She reached out her hand and run it over the cherry tabletop.
In the parlor was an organ. A for-real organ.
When she walked out onto the landing to look down into the foyer from the third floor, she got all dizzy-like, had to grab the railing. She wasn’t afraid of heights or nothing like that, but truth was she never did much like to stand on a high ridge, like Scott’s Ridge or the cliff face on Bald Knob in Drayton County, looking out over the hollows. Made her stomach churn.
But that was fine, her stomach was doing backflips anyway as she wandered around her castle. When she’s a little girl, she’d wanted to be a princess in this castle. But she’d had to wait her whole life, spent all the good years of it living hand to mouth, not nothing to show for all her effort. Wasn’t until she was old that she finally come into her own and there was equal parts gratitude and resentment for that. Well, it’d took her a whole lifetime to get here and she sure as Jackson was gonna squeeze ever drop of juice outta the experience.
She wasn’t no princess now, though. She was the queen and she decided right then and there that she wasn’t going back home, back to the ugly little house where she’d been born on Gizzard Ridge out by Killarney. Decided she wasn’t never gonna set foot in that place again. She’d send the boys to get her things, wasn’t but a handful of things she wanted from there, anyway.
One day, she’d burn it down. She would light a match and pitch it in the door and stand outside and watch it go up in smoke. Sorry only that her daddy hadn’t lived long enough to see it burn. Sorry that she couldn’t have set him inside, maybe poured a little gasoline on him so’s he’d catch quick.
She could have. Him like he was there at the end, she could have done anything she wanted to him. And she did.
The day they come to get her, saying something was wrong with her daddy, she’d prayed the whole way to the hospital, begging God not to let him die. And on that fine day God’d done what the good book says, had given her more than she ever dared to ask or imagine.
Her father’d had a stroke, the doctors said. His whole right side was paralyzed, his face hung down, drooped, and his arm and leg just flopped. He couldn’t hardly move his left side, neither, weak as a kitten he was. Best of all, though — he knew what was going on around him but he couldn’t talk. He could see and understand, could feel it when you squeezed his hand. And when you stuck a needle down into his ear and watched the blood flow out.
She’d told them doctors her daddy wasn’t gonna stay in no hospital, not when he had a family to take care of him. And she had brought the old man home to Nower County so’s she and her sisters could see to him. They took turns, passed him from one to the other.
The terrified, haunted look in his eyes when she went to pick him up from one of her sisters’ houses told her what she wanted to know, that they’d taken the opportunity to “see to daddy” just like she did, but she hadn’t never asked.
His friends would come to visit him sometimes, sit and talk to him while she stood by, smiling. She’d watch him try to communicate, try to talk to them — desperate to communicate, his eyes begging for help. But wouldn’t nothing come out his mouth but sounds that didn’t make no sense, and she didn’t never hurt him where nobody could see, of course. Was careful like that.
He lived less than a year and she made every second of it count. When he passed, she was the one to dress him before they put him in the coffin so wouldn’t nobody see all the burns — some scarred over, some fresh. And after she got him dressed all nice and proper, didn’t nobody notice that he didn’t have no fingernails nor toenails, even though folks passed by real slow to say goodbye at the viewing. Didn’t nobody but her sisters see he didn’t have no privates no more, neither, and nary a one of them ever mentioned it to her. Viola’d been the one got rid of his “manhood.” Real slow. Piece by piece.
But she surely did wish he’d lived long enough for her to burn him up in his own house, lying in the bed where he’d done what he’d done to her — it was her earliest clear memory so she musta been two or three years old. Kept at it, done her and her sisters night after night, year after year. Wasn’t nothing terrible enough to do to him to pay for that. But she hadn’t never in her life considered longer or harder on what she could do, and she made sure everything she done counted.
Burning him alive in that bed woulda been the icing on the cake, but he had denied his daughters that final gift, and that was a pure shame, for a fact.
Suddenly, the front door flew open and all three of her sons lumbered in like cows coming home to the barn.
“We got him, Mama,” Neb bawled. “Locked him up in the jail just like you said.”
“You done tracked mud all over the floor,” she cried, and the boys looked down like they’d just now
noticed for the first time in their lives that they had feet. “Get on out of here!” She shooed them right back out the way they’d come in. “And don’t you come back ‘til you’ve cleaned up yore boots!”
Soon’s they was something resembling presentable, she made them sandwiches from the big jar of peanut butter she found in the pantry where Mr. Nower had hoarded up all kinda food, enough to feed her and hers for a month of Sundays. Not that it mattered. Wouldn’t have made no never mind if the pantry hadn’t had nothing in it but a sack of flour full of weevils. She’d take whatever she wanted whenever she wanted it from whoever had it. She wasn’t never again gonna have to worry about having enough to eat.
Then she sent Neb and Obie to the courthouse to set her up in the sheriff’s office, and see if they couldn’t talk Betty Greenleaf, the dispatcher, into volunteering to stay on under the new … administration.
Then she got Zach to put out a message over the phone tree — didn’t have to go nowhere because there was a phone right there in the Nower House — the Tackett House! Two phones, in fact, one upstairs and one downstairs. She made him repeat what he was supposed to say three times, so’s he wouldn’t screw it up.
Since Viola hadn’t never had a telephone, she didn’t have nobody to call and she dearly would like to do that. Just pick up the phone and talk to somebody, easy as you please. Didn’t want the boys around watching when she done it, though, in case she didn’t get it right the first try. She’d wait until Neb got to the courthouse and then call the sheriff’s office, make up some reason so he wouldn’t know she was just playing with the phone like a little kid with a new Christmas toy.
She smiled broadly, revealing the space between her two front teeth.
Chapter Sixteen
Toby Witherspoon found the proof he needed as soon as he stopped looking for it.