The Amulet

by Michael McDowell

  Not a word was mentioned to Johnny of Audrey’s crime. The most charitable whispered among themselves that Audrey had, entirely by mistake, dropped the Taylor baby into the washing machine, and then killed herself in remorse. But they didn’t really believe it. Others said that it was no wonder she did what she did, what with all the white murders and suicides in town that week. She was just imitating them. The shame however was that she had chosen to murder one of the Taylors, seeing that Mr. Taylor had kept Johnny Washington out of the pen for a murder he had unquestionably committed. It looked like ingratitude. But most people could see no reason at all for Audrey’s action. The girl had been a little stiff, some­times, and sharp of tongue, but she was completely trust­worthy—they had thought—and had been universally admired for the way that she kept Johnny Washington in check. Lord knew what would become of the man now that he didn’t have Audrey, who told him when to stop drinking and when to start working; who bought his clothes and made sure he didn’t get in trouble with the police and the welfare department. It was a terrible thing, and just real bad, real bad, in that it came so soon after all the trouble in Selma. Selma wasn’t much more than eighty miles away, and there were some people—white people—who hadn’t known Audrey, who might say that she had killed the little Taylor baby just because it was white and she wasn’t. This was such a terrible thought that the black people did not even dare speak it outside their own families.

  Of course, there was great consternation in the white section of Pine Cone as well, especially among the fam­ilies who had black maids and gardeners. Would they turn too? Nothing like this had ever happened before. It was the first time anyone could remember that a black person had killed someone white; and it was the first time anyone could remember that a baby had been murdered. No one knew how to look at it. At first people were in­clined to speak ill of Audrey, who was, they said, nursing a grudge against Mrs. Taylor, or was trying to start a racial war, or something else equally improbable; but Mrs. Taylor and her husband told anyone who asked their complete bewilderment over the murder of their year-old child. “Audrey was a good girl. She was always here on time. She didn’t mind working on Saturday. She’d do the floors. She was good to the two boys,” said Mrs. Taylor, and whimpered at the last.

  “I don’t know what possessed her to open the lid of that machine. I don’t know why she would do such a thing,” said her husband, and at this point in their tale of woe Mrs. Taylor always began to cry in earnest.

  The whole thing was even more difficult to understand than why Morris Emmons had shot Jim Coltrane. This latter story had been brought back to Pine Cone that afternoon by Sheriff Garrett and Deputy Barnes, and had just begun to circulate through the town when it was over­taken and surpassed by the horror of Ralph Taylor sloshed to death in the washing machine. Emmons and Coltrane were grown men, after all, neither of them par­ticularly likable. And grown men were prone to fire guns at one another for insufficient reasons. The disturbing part of the Emmons thing was the cotton baler; even if he hadn’t jumped into it, even if his death had been an ac­cident, why was he chasing a dog through the peanuts? Why hadn’t he just tried to get away after killing Coltrane? Why had he committed murder so casually, in front of witnesses?

  “Both of ’em,” the sheriff said, and shook his head, “they committed murder, and there wasn’t no way for ’em to get away with it. Emmons shot Coltrane right in front of Homans and ol’ Miz Baines. If he was planning on doing it, he should have got the man alone, by himself. And Audrey Washington, and I’m surprised at what that girl did, if she wanted to kill that baby, she should have given it poison or something. She could have dropped it headfirst on the floor. She would have lost her job, letting the baby get killed, but wouldn’t nobody know she did it on purpose. That’s what don’t make no sense—why wit­nesses? why the washing machine?”

  “Well,” said Deputy Barnes, “they both got theirs back. We don’t have to put ’em on trial. They didn’t get the chance to get off. And they died painful. Cotton baler’s worse than gunshot. I don’t know which one would be worse though—’lectrocution or the washing machine. Not much choice there, so far as I’m concerned, though I ’spect that ’lectrocution’s got more dignity.”

  The sheriff and his deputy then noted the similarity between these four deaths, and the other four that had occurred the week before when Thelma Shirley and Dorothy Sims had murdered their husbands. Both had seemed not to care that they would be caught, and both then died themselves, apparently by accident.

  “Yeah,” said the sheriff, “it’s a pattern, and I don’t like it a bit. I mean, it’s probably just as well that the people who do the murdering die, but I just wish it’d stop altogether.”

  Other people in town also drew the parallels, but no one could make anything of them. It was like a fever or the measles or something, only much worse, because peo­ple died from it. Eight people dead, and that wasn’t even counting the other eight who had perished in Pine Cone in the last week as well, from accident: the seven Coppages and poor old Miz Weaver. People weren’t even surprised on Friday morning to see a little article on the town in the Montgomery Advertiser which told about the four murders of particular violence and unknown motive, and the strange and providential deaths of these murderers immediately thereafter.

  Chapter 59

  It was in Friday morning’s paper that Sarah first learned of the four deaths in Pine Cone the previous day, four deaths that had occurred before nine o’clock, when Becca and Sarah had manipulated the Ouija board.

  Becca handed the Advertiser to Sarah, when they met at the purple Pontiac. “I just now saw it,” gasped Becca. “I’d have called you up, but I just this minute looked at it.”

  Sarah read the article hurriedly, but by the time she had finished, she was sweating. “That’s four more. That makes sixteen. And the wee-gee board was right. All four of these took place before we started on the wee-gee board last night.” Sarah was grim, and she closed her eyes.

  Becca backed the car out of the driveway. “Sarah, we don’t know for sure. We don’t know anything for sure. I mean, it sort of makes sense that it was Morris Emmons, ’cause we saw Morris Emmons and he was hanging around the pigpen and maybe he did find it after all. But this little colored girl, I mean how did she get it from Morris Emmons? That don’t make sense. Morris Emmons was way out in the country, and this girl wasn’t hardly old enough for a learner’s permit. How’d the amulet get back in town? How’d it get from Morris Emmons to a little colored girl who was taking care of Miz Taylor’s kids? That’s what don’t make sense.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Why are you trying to argue with it, Becca? There was twelve people dead that we knew about. The wee-gee board said it was sixteen, and now we hear there’s four more people dead in Pine Cone, and don’t it make more sense to believe that them four all died because of the amulet too?”

  Becca shook her head. “Maybe the wee-gee board was lying. Maybe it was lying to us. You know, when we asked it about who was gone be next, and how many, and it just talked nonsense . . .”

  Sarah moved uneasily in her seat. “Maybe it just cain’t tell the future. Maybe it can only talk about things that’s already happened,” she suggested faintly.

  Becca shook her head, but would not continue the argument. “I don’t know what to think. What are you gone do now? What are we gone do now?”

  Sarah didn’t know. “Let’s you and me try to think this thing out. We couldn’t do anything till dinnertime anyway, and probably we won’t be able to do anything then. But let’s just think about it this morning.”

  On their coffee break Becca and Sarah talked with other women on the line, and got what additional infor­mation they could about the four deaths in Pine Cone the day before. Much of the gossip was patently false, and made up to fit the strangeness of the events, but what was apparent in all the stories that Becca and Sarah heard, was that the crimes were essentially motiveless, that the deaths of the murderers
were unintentional and terrible.

  Sarah went out of her way to speak to one of the black women on the cleaning crew that morning, and from her Sarah learned a little about Audrey, and about Johnny Washington. She also learned that Audrey could be “visited” at the Silver Pine Funerary Home over on Swiss Street. “But, I tell you,” the women cautioned Sarah, “not gone be many white folk over there, ’cause white folk been talking about how Audrey was thinking about voting rights and sitting at the back of the bus when she stuck that poor little baby in the washing machine.” Sarah protested that she didn’t think anything of the sort, and that she was sure that Audrey had just gone crazy for a few minutes, and simply hadn’t known what she was doing.

  Sarah debated whether to go to the funeral home at noontime with Becca, but decided against this. She had never heard of any white person visiting the Silver Pine Funerary Home to view a corpse. They frequently at­tended funerals in the black churches, and would go by the houses, but following etiquette that was alike unknown in origin and unbroken, they avoided Mr. Garver’s estab­lishment.

  But Sarah did get Becca to drive her over to Johnny Washington’s house. Sarah approached the place cau­tiously, and was stared at by eight or nine glum-faced men and women on the front porch. Sarah asked timidly if she could speak to Johnny Washington, but she was in­formed that the man was sleeping off a drunk, and couldn’t be waked for no reason a-tall, unless she had come to offer him a job. Sarah shook her head, and apol­ogized sincerely for intruding. She thanked the people and turned to go, but one old man, seeing that Sarah had meant no harm, called out, “Hey, ma’am, you can talk to him tomorrow at the funeral. He’ll be up by then. He loved Audrey. He wouldn’t miss Audrey’s funeral. She was all that he had.”

  Sarah nodded and walked back to the car. Becca had heard the exchange, and she turned to Sarah, about to ask her again, “What now?” when she saw that her friend had begun to weep.

  Rather than provide consolation in that exposed place, Becca drove away immediately, and in another two min­utes they were outside the town limits, on a dirt road that skirted Burnt Corn Creek. Becca pulled up into a little paved area with three rotting picnic tables in an artificial clearing at a picturesque bend in the stream. No one else was about.

  “Let’s go sit out there, just a few minutes,” said Becca soothingly to Sarah, who still was crying. “We got time—just a few minutes—and you’ll feel a lot better.”

  They got out of the car, and moved down to the table nearest the water. Here they sat next to one another on the weathered green bench. Sarah broke down entirely, sobbing and gasping, for perhaps a minute, while Becca grasped her round the shoulders tightly, and whispered incomprehensible consolations in her ear.

  Sarah at last placed her hand over her mouth, until she had stopped crying. She rubbed the tears from her eyes, and said, “What am I gone do, Becca?”

  Becca shook her head.

  Sarah continued, “I cain’t put up with this! People dy­ing, and it’s Jo Howell’s fault. It’s Dean’s fault. It’s my fault ’cause I cain’t stop that thing. Today I should have gone up to that funeral home, and walked right in it, and tore that poor girl’s dress off her corpse, just to see if she was wearing that thing. That’s what I should have done, but I didn’t. ’Cause I’m chicken. I was chicken to go up to Dorothy Sims, and now sixteen people are dead. And I’m still chicken.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re doing everything that you can.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know what to do. You think we’re wrong? You think maybe we’re wrong about all of this, that it’s maybe just people killing people, and that’s all there is to it? That makes more sense, don’t it, than talking about this piece of jewelry?”

  “It don’t none of it make no sense at all,” said Becca. “It don’t really matter what we believe. It don’t make no sense. If it made sense, they wouldn’t write about it in the Montgomery Advertiser, would they? If there was a ex­planation, we wouldn’t have read about it in the paper this morning.”

  “This afternoon,” said Sarah, dry-eyed, “after work, you gone take me to see the sheriff. And we gone talk to him, just talk, and I’m gone ask him about the amulet. I’m not gone tell him what we think, I’m just gone ask him if he’s seen it. And if he sees it again, then I’m gone tell him to get it, and give it to me.”

  “You think he’s gone believe you?”

  “I don’t care. But we got to do something. We’ll see what he says, and if we have to, we’ll go to that poor little colored girl’s funeral tomorrow.”

  For another few minutes the two women watched the muddy swirling waters of Burnt Corn Creek as it ate away at the clay banks, and then they returned to the assembly line of the Pine Cone Munitions Factory.

  Chapter 60

  “I was meaning to talk to you anyway,” said Sheriff Garrett to Sarah Howell and Becca Blair late that Friday afternoon.

  On the way home from work the two women had been trying to screw their courage up to see the sheriff, when they had seen his cruiser parked in front of his house. Garrett himself had been standing in the bushes in front of his picture window, turning on the sprinkler. Becca pulled the Pontiac up behind the cruiser, and the two women hesitantly got out of the car. The sheriff waved to them, and moved cautiously around the circular foun­tain of water.

  “What’d you want to talk to us about?” said Becca, try­ing to put off the evil hour of speaking to the sheriff about the amulet.

  “This necklace you were looking for . . .”

  Both women trembled. “How’d you know about that?” Sarah faltered.

  “Mal Homans told me.”

  The women stared at the sheriff blankly. The name meant nothing to them.

  “Mal Homans was Jim Coltrane’s brother-in-law, the man that Morris Emmons killed. Homans told me you was out looking for a necklace . . .”

  Sarah nodded hesitantly. “That’s right. Morris Emmons must have told him, ’cause I told Morris Emmons about it.”

  The sheriff cocked his head curiously, evidently want­ing to ask Sarah why she had gone to Morris Emmons about a missing piece of jewelry, but instead, he contin­ued with his story. “Well, this necklace—and it seems real peculiar to me—was in the pig’s mouth that went and killed Merle Weaver—”

  Sarah and Becca both gasped, but the sheriff went on. “Fell out of the pig’s mouth. Mal Homans and Jim Col­trane took that necklace—after Emmons told ’em that you was looking for it, Sarah—and went and put it round Em­mons’s head. Then Emmons come out front in the store, and blew Jim Coltrane to kingdom come.”

  Becca and Sarah nodded dismally; they had heard this part of the story.

  “I mean,” said the sheriff, eyeing the women closely, but not with any hostility, “don’t all of that seem peculiar? You don’t shoot somebody because of a practical joke, and putting a necklace round somebody’s neck don’t seem much of a joke anyway, does it?”

  Becca and Sarah shook their heads.

  “I was just wondering if you knew anything about all this? I mean,” said the sheriff with a furrowed brow, “you was looking for a necklace, Sarah, said it belonged to you, so how did it come to be in the mouth of a marauding pig?”

  “Where is it now?” asked Sarah. “Did you find it?” She realized that this was a senseless question, since it had obviously already passed on to poor Audrey Washington, and heaven only knew where it was by this time.

  The sheriff shook his head. “It probably got mashed up in the baling machine with the rest of Morris Emmons.”

  Sarah shook her head. “No, it didn’t.”

  The sheriff looked at her quizzically, and then Sarah recounted to him the history of the amulet, how it had got from the Coppages all the way through to Morris Em­mons. She did not say anything about Jo and Dean, ex­cept that it was Jo that had given the piece to Larry Coppage in the first place. Sarah told it carefully for she had gone over it many times in her mind, and was able to prove, suffi
ciently for the sheriff, that indeed the amulet had been present at each of the deaths in question.

  “But,” she concluded, “I don’t know how it got from Morris Emmons to Audrey Washington. Audrey fits right in the pattern”—the sheriff nodded reluctantly—“but I just cain’t figure out how she come by it.”

  “Johnny Washington gave it to her,” said the sheriff quietly. “He saw Morris Emmons die. He was out there at Mr. Crane’s place, and he must have picked it up off the ground, and carried it to Audrey.”

  Sarah winced. There was now no doubt that Audrey Washington and Ralph Taylor were the latest links in the ever-lengthening chain.

  “You believe us then,” said Becca simply.

  “I don’t think so,” said Garrett after a moment. “I mean I believe you about following this thing around. You wouldn’t lie to me about something like that. You saw it, or you talked to people who saw it. I can go and ask ’em myself. And I will. There’s something real pecul­iar about all of this, and if it’s that thing that you’re talk­ing about that’s causing it all, then maybe if we can find it, we can stop it.”

  Sarah explained that she had gone by Johnny Wash­ington’s that afternoon, but had not been able to talk to him. She had also not gone to the funeral home, and apologized for her cowardice.

  “It’s all right,” said Garrett kindly. “You let me do that. It’s easier for me. They’re not gone object to me talking to Johnny Washington about that piece of jewelry. I’ll find it, if it’s there.”