The Amulet

by Michael McDowell

  Mary heard the screeching of the truck’s brakes and she stared out the window but could see nothing of what was happening. Making sure that her uncle’s corpse was farther downstream, Mary struggled out the right-hand window of the backseat and fell into the water; she came up sputtering and screaming, “Snakes! Snakes!”

  Chapter 33

  Jack Weaver backed his truck off the bridge, and onto the narrow shoulder of the highway. Shaking, he climbed down out of the cab and ran quickly over to the body of Dorothy Sims. It was apparent from the abnormal way in which her torso was bent that her back had been broken. He took Dorothy’s hand; there was no pulse. He breathed an automatic but thoroughly sincere prayer, and closed the woman’s eyes.

  His wife Merle was also out of the truck now and had approached timorously. “Jack,” said the woman, “is she dead? Did we kill her?”

  “She’s dead,” he replied. The middle-aged couple then looked up, and saw for the first time that the bridge had been broken through, and that there was a car in the water. Mary had just come up out of the water and be­gun to scream for fear of the snakes.

  “Oh, Jack, they must have been in a accident, and we run the poor woman down when she was trying to get help!” cried Merle.

  “You go get the child, Merle. Poor thing’s in hysterics. Get her out of the water.”

  “What about this lady?”

  “I’ll put her on the back of the truck. I don’t want the little girl to have to see her, and then we’ll drive into Brundidge. Looks like that was where they was headed.”

  “Maybe the girl will know,” said Merle.

  Merle and Jack Weaver were good, conscientious peo­ple and this accident was an enormous burden on their minds, not because of the possible consequences of it to themselves, but simply because of the death of the un­fortunate woman whom they had killed and because of the child. They owned a small farm on hard acreage and had worked all their lives tearing a living from the stub­born earth. They were pious, well-meaning people, whose only child had been electrocuted during a rainstorm.

  Merle climbed down to the creek bed, and waded out into the water toward Mary, soothing her with her words. “They’s no snakes, child. No snakes! I’ll carry you, come here, child!”

  Mary stopped blubbering and began walking toward Merle through the water. Merle snatched her up out of the creek and brought her to the shore. There she waited a few minutes in order to give her husband time to place Dorothy’s body out of sight on the back of the truck.

  “You tell me what happened, child,” said Merle, pite­ously.

  “Well,” said Mary, with a conspiratorial air, “we was going to Montgomery—”

  “You and your mother,” interrupted Merle.

  “My mama’s dead,” whispered Mary.

  “You saw it then!” cried Merle, thinking that the child had been witness to the accident.

  “My mama’s dead, because we buried her today. This afternoon. My daddy’s sister was in the car, and she just now run up here into the trees.”

  Merle was shocked and dismayed to think that the child had lost her mother and now her aunt in so short a time.

  “We was going to Montgomery,” Mary continued, with her eyes almost shut tight, “and we come to this bridge and Aunt Dot turned the wheel of the car, and we went in the water with all them snakes in it. And then Malcolm—that was Dot’s husband—tried to get me out of the backseat, where there was all this water, you know, and Aunt Dot beat him over the head with a big stick and killed him and he is floating off down to the Gulf of Mexico right now! I thought she was gone kill me next, she could have put a snake in the backseat! You better watch out,” Mary warned her rescuer, “ ’cause she might try to kill you too!”

  “Jack! Jack!” Merle screamed, and pulled the child after her back toward the highway. Jack was just covering the body with a piece of canvas. He turned at his wife’s voice.

  “Jack! There’s another body, floating down the creek—this woman’s husband. The girl says she killed him and then ran up on the road.”

  Jack Weaver’s eyes widened. He ran to the cab of the truck and brought out a heavy-duty flashlight. He stood on the downstream side of the bridge and flashed the light over the surface of the creek. He caught sight of another corpse about twenty yards away, caught in the exposed roots of a cypress that stood at the edge of the water. Jack sickened at the ghastly sight.

  “Merle,” he turned to his wife, “you get in the car with the girl, and don’t you let her see a thing. Don’t you let her look out the window, whatever you do.”

  Merle climbed into the cab, and coaxed Mary in after her. While they waited for Jack to retrieve the body of Malcolm Sims and place it on the truck beside that of his wife, Merle pieced together the events of the past few days from Mary’s rambling narrative and was appalled by all that the child had suffered. When finally, grimly, Jack got into the cab Merle repeated to him what the child had said, being constantly interrupted by Mary with new and inconsequential details, and it was decided that they ought to return to Pine Cone right then.

  Chapter 34

  It was the early part of the evening, but the streets of Pine Cone were already deserted. The Weavers’ pickup truck was parked directly in front of the courthouse, with the headlamps still on. The harsh light from a mercury lamp shone down into the cab, directly onto Mary Shirley and Merle Weaver. The little girl was still wet and bedraggled, and lay with her head in Merle’s lap, very weary and confused by all that had happened since that morning. Merle Weaver stroked the little girl’s hair, and thought of the two corpses in the rear of the truck.

  Presently, Jack Weaver came down the front steps of the courthouse. Sheriff Garrett and Deputy Barnes were directly behind him, talking in low voices. Jack went down and was about to uncover the corpses for their inspection, but the two men first glanced into the front of the truck and saw that it was Mary Shirley inside.

  “Hey, Mary, how you doing?” said Deputy Barnes automatically, but very infelicitously. The sheriff punched him and they moved away before Mary had the oppor­tunity to reply that she was very very wet.

  From Jack’s description of what had happened on the road and of the story related to him by the little girl who had survived the strange happenings on the highway and in Burnt Corn Creek, the sheriff and his deputy had concluded that the bodies must have been those of Mal­colm and Dorothy Sims.

  Garrett and Barnes glanced at one another and shook their heads. Then they moved round beside Jack, one on either side, and glanced as he pulled back the canvas, uncovering the upper portions of the two corpses. The faces were ghastly in the mercury light, and still wet with thin blood and creek water.

  “The girl,” Jack repeated, “say she,” and he indicated Dorothy Sims, “beat him,” and he nodded at Malcolm. “Beat him over the head with a pine branch until he was dead, and then she ran up on the bridge.”

  Sheriff Garrett pulled the canvas entirely off. “If she’d have been wearing something light colored, maybe you’d have seen her,” he said, trying to console the farmer, who was obviously greatly distraught.

  The deputy said then, “She was at her own brother’s funeral today—he was a deputy just like me—and so she wouldn’t have been wearing white in no case.”

  “And this wasn’t their little girl, then?” said Jack.

  “No,” said the sheriff. “Like I said. Mary was James Shirley’s little girl. James Shirley was this woman’s brother. James Shirley’s wife pushed a ice pick into his brain and then cut her throat. That was on Thursday night.”

  Jack shook his head and whistled. “What’s gone come of her now?”

  Sheriff Garrett shrugged.

  “We gone get in trouble, Sheriff?” the farmer asked. “You know,” he said piteously, “I didn’t mean to run the woman down.”

  “Well,” Garrett replied, “wasn’t your fault, like you said. She wasn’t wearing white, and she ought not be run­ning up on bridges when the sun’s
gone down. And she ought not be killing her husband with pine branches ei­ther.”

  “Ought not do that in any case,” added the deputy. “No, sir,” he added a moment later, for emphasis, when no one thought to second his opinion.

  “It’s real peculiar,” mused the sheriff.

  “What is?” said Jack.

  “Ever’body dying like they are . . .” said the sheriff.

  “You mean these two, and then the policeman and his wife?” asked Jack. “Not much family left there, is there?”

  “Wasn’t just them,” said Deputy Barnes, “ ’cause last Wednesday night, seven people burned up on the other side of town.”

  “Well,” said the farmer, “burning up’s a lot different from stabbing and shooting and getting run down on bridges and being hit on the head with pine branches in the middle of the creek.”

  “Maybe,” said the sheriff, “but I tell you, sir, I just can’t say I was surprised when you folks pulled up and said you had two bodies in the back of your truck, what with all these people dying. And if I had thought about it for twenty seconds I think I could have guessed that it would be Malcolm and Dorothy Sims.”

  “And you know what’s funny too?” said the deputy.

  “What?” asked the sheriff, pulling the canvas back over the corpses; there wasn’t any point in examining them further now.

  “For the last nine dyings,” said the deputy, “we ain’t had one open coffin, and from the looks of these two, we’re not gone get it now.”

  “We not gone get them anyway. They was from Mont­gomery, just down for the funeral.”

  “You’d think she’d have waited till they got back to Montgomery,” said the deputy.

  “I sure do wish she had,” said Jack Weaver, shaking his head slowly.

  At this point, little Mary Shirley leaned her head out the cab of the truck, and said loudly, “And you know what, Sheriff? She did it on purpose! She pushed the car off the road! I saw her turn the wheel! She did it ’cause I saw her do it!”

  “Mary,” said the sheriff, “you be quiet, till we know what’s gone come of you.”

  “They’s all dead,” said the little girl with more gravity. “I don’t know what you gone do ’bout me. They’s Gussie, I could go live with Gussie, ’cept I just know she’s gone make me eat collard greens, and I hate collard greens.”

  Merle Weaver drew the little girl back into the truck and held her tight against her breast for warmth and com­fort.

  Chapter 35

  The parking lot of the Pine Cone Munitions Factory was two acres of packed red dirt that was bright blood-colored dust in dry weather and thick, sucking mud after any amount of rain. A small corner of paved ground was re­served for those high up in the company. A great array of automobiles crowded this lot every working day: cars that were twenty and even thirty years old, cars that had been purchased only the week before and still retained the deal­er’s stickers on the side windows, all manner of trucks and vans, a couple of motorcycles, and even a school bus.

  At lunch time every day, many workers came out into this dusty, dry, barren area, not because it was inviting certainly, but because it was a change from the interior of the factory. Here they stood about and talked in little groups, sitting on the hoods of cars, crouching in the shade of the larger vehicles, even catching little naps in the back­seats if the sun had not made the vinyl upholstery unbear­ably hot. They drank soft drinks out of cans with straws, or smoked cigarettes lifted out of large purses with loud catches, or even passed around a thermos filled with rum and Coca-Cola.

  On Monday afternoon Becca Blair made a date for the following Saturday night with the man who daily checked the electrical wiring of the plant; she then joined Sarah Howell, who was leaning against the side of Becca’s Pontiac, flipping through a copy of Reader’s Digest looking for the jokes.

  They had hardly had time to exchange a few words, when the woman down four from Becca on the line ap­proached them hurriedly. “Let me tell you what I just heard!” she cried breathlessly, and the three women auto­matically made a little circle between the two cars.

  “First,” said Becca, “you tell us who told you, ’cause I want to know if I’m gone believe it after I hear it.”

  “I heard it from my own Anna-Lee,” said the woman, who had a girl the same age as Becca’s daughter Margaret, “and Anna-Lee is a good girl, wouldn’t tell no lies—not to her own mother—and she got it straight from one of the colored ladies in the lunch line at school not fifteen min­utes ago. I had to pick her up at the school and drive her over to the dentist, so that’s how I found out so quick. Anyway, this lady on the lunch line is the sister of Gussie who used to work for the Shirleys, course that was ’fore she killed him. I mean, before Thelma Shirley killed James. So far as I know, Gussie didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  “All right,” said Becca, laughing shrilly, “we’ll believe it. Anna-Lee’s word is good by me!”

  “What’d you hear?” said Sarah.

  The woman spoke with great significance. “Little Mary Shirley is back in school!”

  Becca and Sarah could make nothing of this.

  The woman continued, “Little Mary Shirley was in school this morning.”

  “That supposed to mean something?” asked Becca.

  The woman nodded mysteriously.

  Sarah said uneasily, “But she was off to Montgomery with her aunt and uncle yesterday. They were supposed to leave directly after the funeral. They did leave,” she said after another moment, “because I called the house, and Gussie said that they were on their way.”

  “Didn’t never make it to Montgomery,” said the woman gravely.

  “What do you mean?” demanded Sarah.

  “Well,” said the woman, and then she related in a quick, low voice, “Car jumped the road, flew in the creek, smashed up on a sandbar, burst into flames in twenty-five seconds, and then that woman, the policeman’s sister—who was already acting very peculiar at the funeral if you ask me what I thought about it—hit her husband over the head with the right front fender till his eyes bugged out . . .”

  Sarah and Becca gasped in surprise.

  “Choked to death on his own blood, and floated down the river till he got picked up by a colored man fishing for rainbow trout since early that morning. It was his only catch of the day. That corpse would have made it to Elba in two more hours . . .”

  “What happened to Dot Sims?” demanded Becca. “Why’d she do it?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” the woman replied. “Don’t no­body know why she did it, don’t make no sense, ’cause little Mary saw it all, trapped in the backseat with the car on fire and ever’thing. And if the woman was planning to get rid of him, you wouldn’t think she’d have done it in front of a child—that wasn’t even her own. She must have known that the child would say something about it later, you know what I mean? Unless she was planning for the child to be cremated right then and there, in the middle of the creek!”

  Sarah and Becca nodded. “So what happened to her?” Sarah asked. “Where is she now?”

  “She run up on the road, trying to flag down the Mont­gomery bus, which was due just about then, and got run down by this fourteen-year-old boy in a Oldsmobile, who didn’t have a learner’s permit yet, and the police found two quarts of moonshine whiskey in the backseat. The boy said they belonged to his father, but the police made him walk down the line in the center of the highway and he couldn’t do it. And that child, poor boy, is gone get sent down the river for running down a woman that had just gotten through killing her husband.”

  “Little Mary Shirley,” said Becca, “what become of her?”

  “She was drowning in the back seat of the car, or burn­ing up, I don’t know which, ’cause Anna-Lee didn’t get all the details, and she saw everything, like I said. She’s all right, ’cause she’s in school, ’cept I don’t know how she got rescued, unless it was the bus driver that did it.”

  Becca shook
her head sadly, “That poor child is gone have bad dreams for the rest of her life. First her mama and daddy, and then her aunt and uncle. All in the same week. The women in that family are just no good; I wouldn’t let no man I had around marry into that pack. Just wouldn’t be safe.”

  Sarah objected. “Dot Sims and Thelma Shirley wasn’t related by blood, they was just sister-in-laws. There must have been something else . . .”

  “Something else what?” asked the woman.

  “Poor little girl,” Becca said, thinking of little Mary.

  The whistle sounded, and the three women hurried back into the factory.

  Chapter 36

  Becca and Sarah’s friend was not the first person work­ing at the Pine Cone Munitions Factory to hear of the deaths of Malcolm and Dorothy Sims. The wife of one of the policemen on the Pine Cone force was the switch­board operator in the main administration building of the factory, and when her husband called for his midmorning check-in (she lived in constant fear of his untimely de­mise) he told her of the two corpses in the back of the truck. She managed to relate the story to a number of her friends and co-workers in the next hour, but these women had not known Dorothy intimately—the dead woman had been on the assembly line, but that was several years be­fore—and so the tale did not spread as far as it might have.

  In the middle of the morning, one of the two black utility drivers was sent to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket to buy coffee for the administrators’ lounge. Since the driver did not enjoy such an amenity at the factory, he felt he was at least entitled to a cup of coffee and a piece of pie and stopped at the diner by the railroad tracks, where, in slack hours, black men were served so long as they did not seat themselves. There he overheard the two friendly waitresses tell breathlessly of what had occurred the pre­vious evening on the road north out of Pine Cone. When this man returned to the factory the information traveled quickly enough among the black employees, not because they had known the unfortunate couple but because it was another example, and a fine one, of white immorality and imbecility.