by Ninie Hammon
Viola Tackett was a sociopath at the very least, and much more likely a psychopath. She had not a shred of sympathy or empathy, she traded on fear and intimidation and utter ruthlessness and brooked no disobedience from any of her underlings — which included him, his brothers and sister and all the people who had worked for her over the years.
Yet in a strange, sick kind of way, she did love one of her children. She loved him, whatever love meant to a woman of such limited emotional capacity. And maybe Essie, though his older sister was more like a family pet to his mother than a human being. She did care about Malachi, though, and for as long as he could stand it, he tried to please her, to live up to her expectations of him.
The day he had fully understood the extent of her madness, he had left. She had used a sledgehammer to break the kneecaps of a rival doper — made his crew and hers watch. The look in her eyes when she brought the hammer down — that was the last straw. Malachi had gotten into the family’s only truck, driven away from Nower County without ever looking back and joined the Marines. Called the Martins who lived at the bottom of Gizzard Ridge and told them to get a message to his mother that her truck was in front of the 4th District Marine Corps recruiting station in Richmond, the keys under the mat.
He didn’t go home for two years after that. And when he did go home, he never stayed more than a few days. When he got back to the base after one of his trips home, he took alternating hot and cold showers. It was symbolic. Hot to “wash off the awfulness,” and cold to “freeze his responses,” to steel himself against the damage to his psyche every second spent in that household wreaked.
Malachi Tackett was way smarter than he had any right to be given his lineage — must have inherited all the IQ points his siblings had been shorted. Smart enough to avail himself of the services of a herd of military shrinks, most of whom were so blown away by the story of his upbringing they were totally useless. One had been helpful, though — Commander Rubin Kaepernack. He was the man Malachi credited with saving his sanity … until it was shredded in Rwanda.
After Kaepernack listened to Malachi’s tales of maternal horror, he had taught Malachi how to survive his brutal upbringing by living his life “based on the wisdom in your scars, not the pain in your wounds.” And he cautioned Malachi — don’t ever go home again. Malachi’d intended to follow his advice. Then Rwanda, and the universe turned his soul wrong side out, and after that, coming home didn’t seem any worse than going anywhere else in the world. Because after Rwanda, the trees everywhere dripped blood.
As he watched his mother pronounce a death sentence on an innocent teenager, he understood that his passivity was in part or in whole responsible for what was happening. He’d bowed out, refused to engage and confront, separated himself from Viola Tackett and everything she was about.
But that wasn’t good enough. He should have stood up to her, should never have let it get this far. The blood of Liam Montgomery was on his hands and so would the blood of this Shaw kid if he didn’t do something.
A bomb of chaos went off in the courtroom when Viola Tackett sentenced Dylan Shaw to death, but when Sam looked back on it later, she could see that it was controlled chaos. Orchestrated chaos. Much like what happened in the county meeting where she’d murdered Liam Montgomery, Viola Tackett was a couple of steps out ahead of everybody else. She had choreographed the scene, made it her own personal ballet, with everybody in the room unwittingly dancing to her tune.
The natural reaction to the circumstance would have been shocked silence, with a squeak of protest here and there, but certainly not a general unrest. There was, after all, the full force of the whole Tackett clan — sans the youngest son, of course — lined up against them and the explosion of noise and movement, shoving and outcries and general displeasure was surprising. Until it wasn’t.
Say you’re Viola Tackett and you’ve set this whole show up for a purpose, as she certainly had done. Would it make a bigger impression to haul the boy out of the courthouse and hang him on the porch steps through a crowd stunned into silence? Or would the bigger, better mousetrap be to haul the boy out through a protesting mob of angry people, a mob Viola would cow, would defy, would stand up against with the brute force of her will, and her sons’ guns, of course.
Which story would make the better telling, and exaggerating? That no one had dared make a peep and the boy had been hauled away to his death against no opposition whatsoever? Or that there was outrage — defiance and opposition that Viola Tackett stomped into submission, clearly demonstrating that she was stronger and more powerful than the combined opposition of a room full of outraged citizens?
The yelling had erupted in an instant, volcanic blast. And as in the meeting where Viola had gunned down her only legal opposition, it came from everywhere in the room at once. From people Viola had planted. Stooges whose job it was to stir up the emotion of the folks around them.
People like Ethel Porter and Wilma Thacker, Martha Whittiker’s neighbors who hadn’t taken a whole lot of convincing to believe their lives were in mortal danger every second the druggie grandmother-killer was at large.
Buddy and Mary Jo Cawdrey, who lived on Bump Road in the north end of the county on the bank of the Rolling Fork and whose loyalty was for sale to whoever had the best weed.
Burt Donaldson from Poorfolk, and Jeb Pruitt, Clyde Biggerstaff and Milt Watson from Killarney — all Viola’s neighbors.
Even ditzy Sally Ann McMurtry, the still-lost-in-the-60s hippie chic who opposed violence in any form, up to and including shooting a deer to put food on the table.
At the most dramatic moment, Viola would swoop in and squash all opposition under her jackbooted authority in a grand show of domination.
Malachi’s brother Obie, the second oldest of Viola’s sons, had been standing with Dylan when Sam, Charlie and Malachi had come rushing into the courtroom to find the boy babbling and blubbering while Viola listened in stony silence. The other brothers were not immediately in evidence until Neb stepped out of the crowd to the left at his mother’s signal and held up a heavy rope dangling a hangman’s noose. Zach stepped out of the crowd on the right and the three converged on Dylan, surrounding him, giving him a quick bum’s rush toward the door. There were other obvious plants in the crowd who’d been instructed to impede the progress of anybody who might be legitimately and sincerely inclined to step forward in the boy’s defense. It was all a grand concert, everybody playing from Viola’s sheet of music, louder and softer at the direction of the maestro.
The first person and the most vocal and hard to control, was Fish. Surprisingly, Holmes Fischer went off like a bottle rocket when Viola had rapped her knuckles on the desk and nodded for Dylan to be led from the courtroom to his death.
He’d been sitting on the floor in front, looking worse than usual, but he had been deteriorating markedly ever since J-Day, courtesy of an ever-shrinking supply of the alcohol that coursed through his veins to lubricate and soothe his jangled nerves and stave off the DT’s.
She’d have thought the man couldn’t have gotten any skinnier. How could you be more thin than skin stretched taught over a skeleton? But he had shrunk, somehow, and looked pitifully haggard and hollow-eyed.
For a homeless man who wasn’t, by its strictest definition, homeless, Holmes Fischer had always hung onto his self-respect. There was some semblance of dignified aplomb to his carriage, a subtle message that he had not always been as he appeared now, that he once had been more than just an upstanding member of society. He’d been on the upper tier, an educated man in a county where ninety percent of the residents couldn’t read above an eighth-grade level. An erudite scholar.
A shadow of that had remained as he sank into alcoholism, and he seemed able to summon it occasionally, slip into it like draping a cloak over his shoulders to cover his deficiencies so he could operate on a level with other sober people.
There was none of that left in him now. He was a desperately skinny drunk, with cigarette-burn h
oles in his face for eyes and an unkempt, unshaven look that even a decade of semi-homelessness had not produced.
When Viola spoke, he leapt to his feet, staggering, and cried out, “No, you can’t do that. No!”
He sounded almost hysterical, and it was clear from the look Viola gave him that she hadn’t planned that particular outburst and hadn’t gotten troops in place to deal with it, quash it before it had a chance to light a flame of genuine resistance.
Her choreography hadn’t anticipated Malachi’s presence either, and though he was not loud and attention-gathering like Fish, he was infinitely more dangerous.
Malachi turned toward Dylan, clearly intent on getting to him before his brothers had a chance, and spiriting him away.
His two oldest brothers, Neb and Obie, were closer to the boy than Malachi and had pulled their weapons on the noisy crowd. Malachi ignored their guns and charged toward them, and they were clearly unprepared for the presence of somebody they absolutely could not shoot, not even in self-defense.
Zach came up behind Malachi and tried to grab him, but Malachi spun on him, hammered him with a quick jab to the face he totally wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared for and he crashed backward onto the floor.
Whenever Sam recalled what happened after that, she could never fit the circumstances into the time it took for them to occur.
Obie held Dylan by the upper arm, Neb stood on the other side of the boy with a gun in one hand and a hangman’s rope in the other. Malachi stopped a few steps from the three of them. He drew the pistol out of the holster at his side, the gun he’d produced out of the duffel bag he’d brought when he “moved into” E.J.’s apartment above the clinic. He didn’t point it at anybody, just held it loosely in front of him. Even in the orchestrated cacophony of the room, Sam could hear what Malachi said to them.
“Put the guns away, you idiots. You aren’t going to shoot me or anybody else. Let him go.”
They stood defiantly in place. Neb might have flicked a quick look toward Sam and Charlie but he snapped his eyes back toward Malachi and stood his ground.
“Mind your own business, Mal, this ain’t none of your con—”
“Stand down.” The menace in Malachi’s voice was thick enough to spread on toast. “Do it now before I have to hurt you. And I will hurt you.”
He still didn’t raise the gun toward his brothers and it was clear whatever he did to them, he could, if he chose, do with his bare hands.
That was when Sam felt her presence. There was no possible way Viola could have gotten up from her seat behind the big desk on the platform and crossed the open area inside the railing to where she and Charlie were standing in the time it took Malachi to confront his brothers.
But she had.
Sam spotted her out of the corner of her eye and was so surprised she actually leapt back. Charlie didn’t leap back, though. She couldn’t. Viola had an iron grip on her upper arm with one hand and a pistol jammed into her side with the other.
“Only person’s gonna get hurt here, son, is yore little friend,” she said, and he whirled toward where she had the drop on Charlie. “You ‘stand down,’ or I will blast a hole in her big enough to drive a forklift through.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Charlie didn’t see Viola’s approach, but she did smell her coming. The old woman had an earthy aroma that was part the smell of damp ground in a garden and part the smell of clothes that’d been worn so often no amount of laundry detergent would ever get them completely clean, an old-fabric smell that reminded Charlie of thrift store clothing. She’d noticed it the day they’d all piled into E.J.’s van for the ride out to the county line for their first look at the mirror-in-the-road Jabberwock.
By the time she actually saw Viola, it was too late to do anything but submit to the iron grip on her upper arm and the feel of the gun barrel in her side.
Viola was squeezing her arm tighter than she needed just to restrain her, and Charlie could feel the rage flowing down through her into her grip, knew if she could have pinched Charlie’s arm off above the elbow she’d had done it in a heartbeat.
And Charlie made a show of trying to shake off the grip, not that she believed for a moment she could free herself, but in defiance. In principle. She wouldn’t just stand there like a cigar store Indian and allow the dumpy little dictator to yank her around.
Viola shot her a glance when she did, a look of desolate hatred that was stunning in its ferocity. It wasn’t until that moment that a couple of things occurred to Charlie. One, Viola Tackett was not accustomed to anybody standing up to her. She was used to giving orders and then standing by while all her minions scurried around to do her bidding. Charlie was granting the woman a brand new experience.
And two, Viola Tackett would be more than happy to kill her, put a bullet in her right on the spot, shoot her down without provocation just like she had Liam. Only two things restrained her from that violent impulse. The crowd of onlookers. And Malachi.
“Let her go, Mama.” The edge of menace in his voice was every bit as lethal as the tone of his mother’s. Though they were certainly not moral equals, neither had a will stronger than the other. Malachi Tackett had never been more his mother’s son than at that moment.
“Step aside and let us get on with bidness that don’t concern you.”
“He’s just a kid what — sixteen or seventeen? You can’t just string him up.”
“Can and will. You need to step out of the way.
The faux chaos and fabricated opposition Viola had worked so hard to orchestrate had died away out of the crowd. No one spoke now, or made any move — either toward Dylan or away from him. They all stood in silence, watching the mother/son drama play out on the stage before them.
Instead of moving out of the way, Malachi took a step that put him between Dylan Shaw and his mother.
“You want him, you’re going to have to shoot me.”
“Now you know I ain’t going to do that, Malachi.” Her voice almost sounded maternal. Almost. Then she cocked the pistol. “But I will shoot this butt-in-ski little shrew here, drop her with a single bullet right to the heart.” She paused, looked him dead in the eye. “You know I ain’t bluffing, boy. You seen enough in all the years you was eating at my table to know I mean ever word I say.”
Charlie looked from one to the other of them, knowing that both of them would die before they’d back down.
Zach began to stagger to his feet, wiping the blood from his split lip on the back of his hand, and Malachi shot a glance his way. Neb struck like a rattlesnake. Maybe there’d been a signal from his mother, but Charlie didn’t think so. He had just seized the opportunity that presented itself, Malachi’s inattention for the second’s advantage he needed. Taking a single step forward, he slammed the barrel of his pistol into the back of his younger brother’s head with a force that pulled a squeak of a scream from Sam’s throat.
Malachi dropped to the floor, his own pistol under his limp body.
There was a one-beat pause, a second of elongated silence during which Charlie felt her own life hanging by a thread. There was absolutely nothing to stop Viola Tackett from shooting her. No reason for the little woman not to set loose the rage Charlie could feel in the clawed fingers of her hand.
She felt the gun barrel jab harder into her side and closed her eyes, wondering what would happen to Merrie now, who would look after her.
“I ain’t done with you, Missy.” The words rode a whisper of bad breath into Charlie’s face. “You will die at my hand, know that for the absolute truth that it is. I ain’t never in my life broke a promise.” The old woman looked around. “Right now ain’t the time, though, so I’ll give you the gift of another couple of sunrises ‘fore I cut you down.”
She shoved Charlie violently at Sam, who stumbled from the impact and the two of them almost landed on the floor beside Malachi.
“Handcuff him,” Viola told Obie, nodding toward the lump of unconscious Malachi on the floor
. Then she wagged her pistol in the direction of the utterly terrified Dylan Shaw. “We done wasted enough time already.”
Her words snapped the gawking crowd out of its trance, but the pandemonium atmosphere she had obviously intended to accompany the act was hopelessly gone and there was nothing Viola could have done to resurrect it.
The crowd was as mute as a eunuch. The only sounds were the shuffling of feet and the mewling cries of the terrified teenager who was beginning to realize he had only minutes to live.
“Come on, now, let’s git ‘er done,” Viola said and lead a reluctant parade out of the room, as Sam and Charlie knelt beside the unconscious form of Malachi on the floor.
Chapter Twenty-Four
No.
No, no, no, no!
This couldn’t be, wasn’t happening. It was all wrong, so wrong!
Fish had to do something!
But what? What could Fish do even sober? And he was far from sober. Not far enough, though, and that was the problem. Ever since J-Day, he had been unable to get drunk enough so that what happened didn’t matter, so life flowed past him on the breeze with a gentle buzzing sound behind it, framed sometimes in an almost golden glow.
He hadn’t seen the golden glow or heard the buzzing sound since he woke up in the Dollar General Store parking lot two weeks ago, choking to death on his own tongue. Wasn’t for lack of effort on his part. He had done nothing else since that day but seek out the alcohol he needed in sufficient quantities to blot out the world. He had always been able to manage that before. Now, the law of supply and demand had changed all that in the blink of an eye.
Finite amount of booze. Infinite need for it. Problem.
That’s what he’d been doing at Martha Whittiker’s place. Dear holy mother of God he had never meant to harm anyone! Never would have dreamed of doing such a thing. He had waited until he knew she wouldn’t be home to sneak into her house and raid her supply of alcoholic beverages. But she had come home sooner than he’d expected. And somehow — even now, more sober than he had been in years, he could not remember exactly what happened. She had walked in on him as he clutched a bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey to his bosom and the next thing he knew she was lying on the floor in a puddle of blood and he was running away as fast as he could.