by Faith Hunter
Neb almost turned around.
Almost.
Dunders stopped at the edge of town and Neb sat heavily in the saddle, knowing that nothing good was ever going to come of riding on. Nothing, no-how.
He rode on.
At a hesitant walk at first, then an unsteady cantor, and finally a full gallop.
Knowing what he would see. The crowd clustered around the jail, swelling as more people ran in. He saw the fists shaking in the air, heard the guns fire into the night sky, saw the big tree in the center of town lit by torches. Saw the rope.
He knew all about lynch mobs. Who didn’t?
Dunders caught his desperate terror and ran harder than ever all the way up the length of Main Street.
Just in time to see.
There were so many things to see.
The sheriff sitting on the wooden plank walkway outside of the jail, his left eye swollen shut, three townsmen holding his arms. Torchlight struck sparks off of the sheriff’s badge, and off the badges of the men restraining him.
The faces of the people in town. People he knew. Mr. Flambeau, Mr. and Mrs. Schusterman, the milliner, the man from the hat shop, the two sons of the farrier, the parents of his friends. He knew those faces and didn’t know them. He knew them as people in town, people he knew or kind of knew, ordinary people whose faces he saw at church or at the town fair or clustered together in front of the general store on every other Tuesday when the mail coach came rumbling in. The faces of the people in his life.
Except now they were different. Now they were screaming and yelling. Now their features were twisted into strange masks by the flickering torches. Now they were like the faces of monsters. Not human at all.
Monster faces.
So many monsters.
Neb saw those faces and didn’t know any of them anymore.
The only face he knew—the only face that he recognized now—was that of his own Pa.
Sitting on a horse. No hat. Face bruised and bloody.
Shirt torn and filthy, hair mussed and hanging loose over his brow. Hands tied behind his back.
A thick loop of rope around his neck. The air was torn apart by the yells of the gathered monsters. They shouted his Pa’s name. They screamed aloud for the three burly men standing by the horse’s head to do something bad. Something impossible.
“No,” breathed Neb, though his voice was too small, too weak to be heard over the shouts.
He saw Mrs. Carter. She stood on a stump, shrieking as she shook her Bible at Pa. The parson was there, too, standing beside the stump, hands clasped together. For a moment—just one clear, sweet moment—Neb thought the preacher was calling for the crowd to stop, to step back, to not do this.
But then Neb saw the smile. A curl of his mouth that was too much like the triumphant smile on the twisted face of Mrs. Carter. That’s when Neb knew it was all going to fall apart, that the hinges of his life had split from the frame and were falling off. He knew that as sure as he knew anything else in his life.
“No…” he said, smaller than before. Faint even to his own ears.
And then it bubbled up from the bottom of his soul, boiling up past his breaking heart and tearing its way from his throat.
“Nooooooooooo!”
It was so loud that it stilled the crowd. It froze the moment. Everyone turned toward him, every face, every eye. Even the horse on which his father sat. They all turned to Neb Howard, but all Neb could do was look into the eyes of his father.
“No,” he said again. Once more small and faint.
His Pa said, “Neb, for God’s sake, go home.”
He was crying as he said it. Neb hadn’t seen his Pa cry since that red day in his parents’ bedroom. He’d heard him weeping in the night, but he’d never seen those drunken tears. Now, though, they ran down his cheeks like lines of molten silver. It burned Neb to see them. It stabbed him through and through.
As the moment stretched Neb saw how his presence began to change the faces of those monsters that used to be the people in town. Some of them looked angry that he was there. Others looked down or away, anywhere but at him. Some cut looks at Mrs. Carter, the sheriff, the rope, as if calculating how far this was taking them away from the people they were supposed to be.
And in that moment, Neb thought—wondered, hoped, prayed—that they were going to step back, cut him down, release the sheriff, not do this. They should. He knew it and they knew it, because this was a line that no one should cross. Not like this. Not when hate has turned them into monsters.
It was Mrs. Carter—of course it was her—who broke the fragile tension of that moment.
She yelled, “Damn you to Hell, Tom Howard. Your family is waiting for you in the Pit.”
Neb heard the gasps from the people. Even the preacher recoiled slightly from her, his smile dimming.
Mrs. Carter stared down at them, looking around, disappointment and disapproval etched by firelight and shadows onto her face. And her face had never stopped being the mask of a monster.
“No, please,” begged Neb. “For the love of God…”
Mrs. Carter spat toward him and then she threw her Bible at the horse. The leather struck the animal’s hip with a sound like a gunshot. The horse screamed as if scalded. It reared back, breaking loose from the men who held it, then it lurched forward, crashed into the people who were too slow and too shocked to move out of the way in time. The horse raced past Neb and ran down Main Street, the sound of its thudding hooves chopping into the air.
There was no rider on that horse.
Of course there wasn’t.
No one watched the horse go.
They stood like silent statues and stared at the thing that swung slowly back and forth on the end of the rope. No one made a move to cut Big Tom down. There was no reason to hurry. Not with a neck bent and stretched like that.
The parson was the only living person who moved. He walked five paces and squatted down to pick up the Bible. He brushed it off on his black frock coat and then held it out to Mrs. Carter. She stared at him, at the book, and up at the man she’d killed for a long time, then she stepped down and took the book from him, smiling all the while, and giving a small HMPH as she pressed it to her chest. When she walked away, no one said a word, no one tried to stop her.
Mrs. Carter paused for a moment in front of Dunders. She used her free hand to caress the horse’s long nose.
“All sinners go to Hell, Nebuchadnezzar,” she said. “And you will burn alongside the rest of your kin.”
Then she walked away. She never stopped smiling.
No one could look at Neb. Not even the parson.
He sat there and felt his heart turn to cold stone in his chest. He could feel the weight of it as it tore loose from its moorings. It fell and fell, landing in a much lower place. Far too low.
He knew that even then.
4
They buried his Pa the next day. Four men brought his body out on the back of a cart and they set to digging in the front yard. They buried him next to Ma and little Hannah. The parson came out and tried to read some words over the grave, but Neb grabbed a pitchfork and brandished it at the parson.
“You take your lying words and that damn book and you git!” he snarled.
The parson was appalled. So were the gravediggers. “I am here to say a prayer over your father.”
Neb took a step forward, the tines of the pitchfork held at heart level. “Will your prayers keep my Pa out of Hell?”
“You have to understand, son,” said the preacher, “your father was a murderer. He gunned a man down in—”
“I know what he did. I hear people talking. But he was supposed to have a trial so the judge could hear both sides of the story. What happened to that? Did you speak up to protect my Pa from those crazy people and their damned rope?”
“I—”
Neb sneered. “Where were your prayers last night? What did you do to stop Mrs. Carter? What did you do to stop all those people?”
“You must understand…that was a mob. They were all whipped up and—”
“And what? Ain’t you preachers supposed to stand up for what’s right? No, don’t answer ’cause I know you’d just lie.”
“You ought to watch your tongue, boy,” said one of the gravediggers.
Neb pointed the pitchfork at him. “And maybe you ought to hold yours,” he warned. “This ain’t about you. This is between my folks and his asshole of a god.”
“By the Almighty,” cried the parson. “Do you hear what you’re saying? Do you not fear God’s wrath?”
Neb nearly ran at him with the pitchfork. “Fear God’s wrath? That’s all I know of God. He took my ma and he took my little sister and you told me that she’s burning in Hell because she died ’fore she was baptized. That’s what your God does. And my Pa may not have been the best man but he deserved to have a trial and he deserved justice, but last night I saw you standing right there when Mrs. Carter threw her Bible at that horse. Wasn’t that the wrath of God? She stood there and said it was GOD’S justice, and I didn’t hear you speak out against that.”
Neb moved forward, the pitchfork’s tines gleaming like claws. All of the men, the parson and the gravediggers, moved away. Neb stopped at the foot of the half-filled in grave.
“You people ain’t never done nothing but hate on my family. If you had even a shred of decency, you’d have told us that Hannah would go to Heaven with all the angels. My ma, too.”
“God’s truth is God’s truth. I’m a man of God,” said the preacher.
Neb didn’t want to cry, but the tears came anyway. Hot as boiled water. “You could have had mercy,” said the boy. “You could have lied to us. What you said, what Mrs. Carter said, that’s what broke something in my Pa’s head. It’s what turned him mean as a snake. He wasn’t evil…he was heartbroke. You’re always preaching about saving souls—it wouldn’t have taken much to save his.”
The preacher said nothing.
“Go on and get off my farm,” said Neb, his voice cold even to his own ears. “You’re not welcome here. Not you and not your God. Now git.”
He jabbed the pitchfork toward the preacher and again toward the gravediggers. One of the men started to take a threatening step toward Neb, but the crew foreman caught his arm.
“Leave ’im be,” said the foreman. “This here’s his land now. He wants us gone, then we best be gone.”
The other gravedigger pointed at the grave. The corpse of Big Tom Howard was only partly covered, and there was a considerable pile of dirt standing in a humped mound. “You want us gone, kid, then you best finish this your own self. But bury him deep, ’cause he’s already starting to stink.”
He turned away, laughing, and followed his companions back to where they’d left their cart. The preacher lingered a moment, looking like he wanted to say something else. It was the kind of expression people had when they wanted to have the last word in an argument. But the pitchfork had the last word, and both he and Neb knew it.
The preacher backed away, then turned and hurried to catch the gravediggers.
That left Neb all alone with the half-buried body of his father. They’d wrapped him in white linen and someone had tied some rope crisscrossed from neck to ankles. Neb figured it was the rope they’d hung him with. People did that so they wouldn’t have to use a bad luck rope.
Neb jabbed the pitchfork down into the ground at the foot of the grave and pulled the small hunting knife he wore in a leather sheath on his belt. With tears flowing down his cheeks he stepped down into the shallow grave.
“I’m sorry, Pa,” he said, sniffing to keep from choking on the words. He bent down and sawed through the ropes. It was a horrible thing to have to do. His father’s body was rigid with death stiffness. Neb knew that this would wear off after a couple of days; he’d seen that with animals he’d hunted and livestock here on the farm. Knowing that his father would go through that process—that he was stiff as a board now—reinforced the fact that Neb was alone. That Pa was dead. That everyone he cared about was dead. He sawed and sawed. It was a task assigned in Hell, and he labored at it with the diligence of the insane. He knew it. He could feel parts of his mind cracking loose and sliding away into darkness.
He stopped abruptly, his face and body bathed in cold sweat, most of the ropes cut, his chest heaving. He felt as if someone was watching him. There was an itch between his shoulder blades. Neb straightened and looked around.
The house was still and silent. The horses in the corral stood with barely a flick of the ear or swish of the tail.
But he saw two things.
One chilled him and the other set fire to something in his soul.
Above the yard, kettling high in dry air, were buzzards. A baker’s dozen of them, swirling around and around. Here to feast on the dead. Neb wished that there was something like them that feasted on the living. Something he could sic on the parson and everyone who was there at the tree last night.
The sight of those birds chilled him.
But the thing that held a burning match to the cracked timbers of his soul was the person who stood watching him. She stood like a specter at the end of the road, her feet on her side but the weight of her stare reaching all the way to the grave.
Mrs. Carter.
And she was smiling.
5
It rained that night.
He saw the storm clouds coming over the mountain. Big, ugly things, dark as bruises, veined with red lightning. The storm growled low in its throat. It sounded like laughter of the wrong kind. The bad kind.
Neb stood by his father’s grave and watched the storm gather.
And he was smiling.
6
Neb filled in the grave with his hands. He didn’t bother to go get a shovel.
The raindrops began falling as he patted it down over his father.
“I love you, Pa,” he told the dirt.
Lightning forked the sky and he looked up, gasping, as thunder boomed above him. The shock of it drove Neb down to his knees at the foot of the grave. He reached up to catch himself on the upright handle of the pitchfork, but his knees buckled and he slid down. He held onto the hickory handle, though, and laid his head against it, eyes closed as the rain fell.
“Come back,” he whispered.
Come back.
He heard his Pa’s voice echo in his memory. There, kneeling much like this at the side of Ma’s bed, holding out the little dead thing and Ma taking it, too far gone to accept that Hannah was dead. Too mad with her own dying to know that the babe she put to her breast was not hungry. Would never be hungry.
“Come back,” said Neb. He was hungry. Not for food. Not for comfort. Not for peace.
He wanted to hurt them all. Mrs. Carter. The parson. All of them. Everyone who’d held a torch or raised a fist. All of them.
“Come back, Pa,” begged Neb. “You don’t belong down there.”
He did not know if he meant that his father did not belong in the ground or in the Hell that everyone said he was bound for.
The rain began to fall in earnest. Big, cold drops that hammered down on him and pinged on the leaves of the oak tree, and peppered the shingles on the slanted roof. Thunder rumbled and rumbled under a sky torn by lightning.
“Come back to me,” cried Neb Howard. “You don’t belong down there and I need you here.”
The hurt in his heart was so big, so deep, so unbearable that he could not even kneel there without caving over. He fell onto his chest, onto his face. He beat the ground as the rain turned the dirt to mud.
The storm kept getting bigger. Louder. Darker.
The clouds swirled and changed from purple to gray to a black so pervasive that it swallowed everything. Only the lightning carved edges and curves onto the things around him, trimming everything with cold fire.
The world seemed to be so huge and so dark and so empty of everything important. No love, no heat.
“Come back, come back, come
back,” he wailed. “Please, Pa, don’t leave me alone. Come back.”
A light flared in the darkness and Neb stared at it. It was the Carter place, and Mrs. Carter was lighting her lamps against the darkness. He watched with hateful eyes as the house seemed to open its eyes, but then the woman began closing the shutters. The effect was like wide eyes narrowing to suspicious, accusing slits.
Neb did not even realize that he had clutched two handfuls of mud until the muck ran from between his fingers. He looked down at the mess. It was so soaked with rain that it ran like black blood down his wrists.
“Come back,” he said. Then he pointed to the distant house with one muddy finger. “If you can’t come back for me, Pa, then come back for her.”
As he said it, the lightning struck directly above him, bathing him in so brilliant a light that it stabbed through his eyes and into his brain. Neb cried out and fell backward, flinging an arm across his face, screaming at the storm, hurling his rage, his curses, his damnation at the sky and all who lived under it. Hating Mrs. Carter and everyone in this damned town with a purity and intensity that was every bit as hot and bright as that lightning.
“Please,” he whispered as he lay there. The rain fell like hammers, like nails. “Please come back to me.”
Neb Howard lay in the cold mud and prayed his dark prayers as the heavens wept and the thunder laughed.
7
He did not remember falling asleep.
He did not know how long he slept.
Neb became aware of being cold. Of hurting from the cold.
It took him a long time to wake up.