Harvestman Lodge

by Cameron Judd

  Over on the far side, a man was placing flowers on a grave. In the lingering early summer light, Eli recognized Donald New, from the Lower Lights Rescue Mission. He remembered the flowers that had been in New’s office and New’s mention that he was going to place them on the graves of his late wife and daughter.

  Eli watched briefly, but felt intrusive and didn’t want to be seen spying. He moved on, then realized he wanted to know the names on those graves. The rescue mission leader had declined to reveal what his name had been before he took on his current, symbolic surname of “New,” but his original name could be ascertained from the names of his deceased wife and daughter.

  Eli had no intention to publish the names and violate his pledge to Donald New. He just wanted to know.

  So rather than driving straight to his apartment, Eli drove through town a few minutes, randomly, to give New time to finish his grave decoration and move on. Eli meandered and admired houses where the lawns and landscaping were well-maintained, and silently chided those where it had been neglected. His father used to do that, out loud, when driving Eli and his mother around Strawberry Plains and Knoxville.

  Eli passed Jake Lundy’s house and saw his friend on his porch, rocking and smoking a cigar. Lundy had told him he smoked two cigars a month, an old habit he’d never felt inclined to alter. Two a month was just right for him, giving him a treat to look forward to just like he looked forward to the one apple pie per month his wife baked. “You can enjoy about anything harmlessly as long as you establish a limit and stick to it,” Lundy had said.

  Eli circled back around and headed toward the cemetery again. New was no longer at the graves, now festooned with flowers. Eli parked and went across to the graves, glancing around as he went in case New was still around. He did not see him.

  He went to the graves New had decorated. He read the names … and was mentally yanked back to the day Melinda had first come to Hodgepodge. He remembered that crude-talking trucker who had later came to a bad end in that highway accident.

  The trucker’s name had been Moody, and he had told Eli his mother was buried in Kincheloe County, and that he had a sister named Emmie, of whom he’d lost track.

  Eli had just found that track. Trucker J.D. Moody’s sister, Emmie, was buried in one of the graves Donald New had just covered in flowers. EMMIE KATRINA MOODY, March 12, 1952 – October 1978. Beloved daughter and mother.

  The grave beside hers was that of LORENE PADGETT MOODY, July 9, 1930 – May 15, 1974. A DEVOTED MOTHER. Emmie’s mother, clearly, and also that of J.D. Moody, truck driver. And she’d been the one-time wife of Donald New, who must have had the surname of Moody in the days before he became, by his own description, “New” in both name and nature.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “WELL, IT IS YOU MR. SCUDDER,” said a voice from behind Eli. Startled, he turned and saw Donald New striding toward him across the cemetery. “I thought it looked like you over here.” New glanced at something lying on top of a nearby tombstone. “Ah, there they are! I got to my car and realized I’d left my keys somewhere while I was putting out those flowers.” He picked up the keys and put them in a pocket.

  Eli was embarrassed at having been caught and came clean. “I drove by a little while ago and noticed you here placing the flowers. You’d said back at the mission that you were going to put the flowers on the graves of your wife and daughter, and I admit I was curious as to their names. But not for the story I’m writing. Just so I could know for myself. Purely personal curiosity. Just like I promised, I’ll not publish the names. Mr. Moody.”

  New knelt and looked at the graves. “Not Moody now. I’m ‘New’ through and through. I never really appreciated the good things in life back when I was Donnie Moody,” he said. “I was selfish, interested only in my own pleasure and gratification. I was as sinful a man as you could find, without any real understanding of what I was doing to myself, to my own family, to my own soul. Poor Lorene … I was unfaithful to her so many times. Unfaithful even on the very night before I left my family abandoned at a motel. I drove off and never went back. Dear God, how could I have been what I was then?”

  Eli had no answer and did not attempt to voice one. He looked at Emmie’s gravestone. “This was your daughter? She died young. Is it all right to ask what happened to her?”

  New’s chin was quivering and it was clear he could easily fall completely apart. “So sad,” he said. “So very sad. I wasn’t there to see her in her last days, and I learned the story only after she was gone. I was told most of it by my wife’s sister, who we were going to visit the night I pulled into the Winona Court Inn because of an overheating car, and because I’d seen a sinful opportunity I wanted to take advantage of. That night I fell into my usual pattern of sin and unfaithfulness, this time with a poor exploited girl who was so pathetic, so sad, so misused by the very man to whom it had fallen to raise her … God forgive me. God forgive me and all the others who hurt that poor ragged child. It was my sin of that night, combined with a hundred similar sins of days and nights before that, that destroyed my family. It was Emmie herself who found me out that night, and told Lorene … and being the worm that I was in those days, I reacted by just fleeing and throwing my own family away. And myself.” Emotion surged. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. I just drove away from them, with them standing there. Drove away!”

  New was unable to speak for a few minutes, quietly sobbing. At last he drew in some deep and ragged breaths and pulled himself together. “Please,” he said. “Put none of this in the story you are writing. I beg you.”

  “Not a word of it. I promise. But it helps me to know it. It gives your story, and the story of the Lower Lights Mission, that much more meaning to me as I try to tell it like it should be told.”

  “Thank you.” New straightened and calmed himself further. “You asked about my daughter, Emmie,” he said. “Her story breaks my heart every day of my life. I wasn’t around to see most of it happen, and I suppose I’m mostly grateful for that. What father wants to see his own little girl fall into such a despair that she ends her own life?”

  “Oh. Oh no. What … what happened?”

  “After I abandoned the family and fell into a petty but steadily worsening criminal life, I ended up in prison for some years, the victim of my own evil ways. Lorene went on and did what she could for the kids … she worked in housekeeping for the college here, and kept the kids fed as they finished their growing up. God bless her for how hard she worked for them.”

  “She must have really loved her children,” Eli said.

  “She did. But neither she nor I had the character and the ability to raise children as they should be raised. There were no ‘lower lights’ burning in our family to guide them toward the higher light in the harbor. Emmie drifted into a lifestyle that compromised her. Bad choices, made in desperation and loneliness, and from the lack of guidance. I’m told she did like so many young women and involved herself with the wrong kind of men … just as my Lorene had done when she involved herself with me. The old me. I wish she could know me as I am now. I wish.”

  Eli found no reply to make. New continued his narrative.

  “I don’t think Emmie ever fell into prostitution or drugs, but she did become a, well, performer … of the wrong sort. A dancer in a troupe with other lost young women doing what they thought they had to do to survive. And she ended up with a baby, fathered by a man unwilling to stand by her and become her husband. He made her promises, then left her to care all on her own for the child he’d planted in her. I don’t where that man is now, or even what his name was, and it doesn’t matter, because he was gone from her very quickly. Poor Emmie did her dancing and worked in bars where she had to strut around and show herself off like a thing instead of a God-created human being … just so her little child could be fed. It’s a wicked world out there, Eli, wicked as the pit of hell. And so many young innocents get trapped in it and get their innocence destroyed. It was that way wit
h poor Emmie. My little girl!”

  He had to stop and weep a little more, and Eli wondered if he’d done wrong to ask the man to share with him, for the mere sake of his own curiosity, a story so personal and wrenching. Wrong or right, Eli was fascinated and moved by what he was hearing.

  “What became of Emmie’s baby?”

  “Only God above knows. I never met her child … my own grandchild. All I know is that somehow the little one was taken away from my daughter, how and where, I don’t know, and the loss made Emmie so hopeless that, two weeks later, she went to a motel, alone, and put an end to herself.” More tears from Don New now. “Alone there in a room in the very motel where our family spent its last night together. The last night I spent under the same roof as my family. I don’t know if Emmie chose that particular place because our family had been there, of it it was simply the handiest choice.”

  Eli felt he had to say something, even though he could think of nothing but the obvious. “I’m sorry for all you’ve lost, Don.”

  “Young man, let me tell you that God forgives sin, and makes wretched old sinners into his own eternal treasures … but even then, even with grace greater than sin, there is still pain that lingers. A man with an amputated leg can sometimes still feel hurting where the leg used to be. It’s like that with the wrongs we do. Even a healed wound can hurt. Even forgiven wrongs still carry a sting sometimes.”

  ELI CALLED MELINDA WHEN AT last he reached his apartment. He was quite depressed from his conversation with New, and not in the mood to repeat what he’d learned from him just yet. So he limited the call to telling Melinda how much he had enjoyed his visit with her family, how welcome they had made him feel, and then he told her of the invitation to visit Coleman Caldwell. As he’d hoped, she was glad Eli had already accepted on her behalf as well as his own. Of course she’d be glad to go, if for no other reason than seeing what a house that was so overgrown on the outside would look like on the inside. It would surely be an utter wreck.

  Eli went to sleep that night anticipating the delight of telling Melinda the items of happy news that Curtis Stokes had told him. There were more solemn things to tell, as well … the sad story behind that empty room next to Melinda’s office … but there was no hurry to share those tales. He doubted Melinda even had met Donald New.

  In the course of the evening, a nearly unconscious decision-making process had taken place in Eli’s mind. He had reached the conclusion that he could not wait much longer to ask Melinda to marry him. Their time together had been short, no doubt about it … but not every good thing takes a long time to present itself. She was the one for him, and was certain she held the same view regarding him.

  Thanks to Jimbo, he already had a ring for her. He decided to begin planning the proposal, how he’d go about it, where and when. He’d make it the most romantic, delightful proposal in history. Melinda deserved that.

  YOUNG Megan SNEAKED TO HER SISTER’S room late that night, when Eli was long gone and the household was abed.

  “I like him,” she told Melinda, who had awakened from a deep slumber when Megan crawled onto her bed. “He’s sweet. And kind of cute.”

  Melinda smiled sleepily and nodded. “Yes. He is. I’m glad you like him. I wasn’t sure you would.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I remember that you were fond of Rawls. And Eli is so different.”

  “Yeah. But I like him anyway. And I’m glad he’s not like Rawls … like Rawls turned out to be, you know.”

  “In a way I’m surprised you have much awareness of that situation … you were so young.”

  “Little kids know pretty much everything.”

  “I think maybe they do. You always seem a good example of just how bright a little girl can be.”

  Megan smiled. “That’s nice, Melly. Thank you.” She drifted away into another thought for a moment. “Melinda, do you ever wish we were all-the-way sisters? You know, that you weren’t just adopted?”

  From anyone other than Megan, that phrasing would have offended Melinda. It was different with Megan saying it.

  “There’s no ‘just’ involved,” Melinda said. “When I was adopted, I became part of the family of Ben and Dot Buckingham. They are my parents in the eyes of the law, the eyes of the community, the eyes of God. And in my eyes, too. So I’m not ‘just adopted.’ I’m a Buckingham.”

  “I … I didn’t mean to say something wrong, Melinda.”

  “It’s all fine, Megan. You’re my sister.”

  Megan hugged Melinda. “I love you, Sister.”

  “I love you too. Sister.”

  “And I’m glad Daddy stopped Rawls from hurting you.”

  “I am, too. I kind of wish it could have happened without a shooting, but I’m glad. You know, Rawls wasn’t so bad, sometimes. At the start, when he was pretending to be interested in learning about God, I think that sometimes the pretending turned a little bit real. Rawls had a chance to become something different than he was, different than what his family was, and is. He told me about how the men in his family were taught to be, well, mean and hardened and tough. ‘See what you want and take it.’ That’s what Rawls said the ‘family philosophy’ is for Parvin men. Rawls’s father actually taught him to repeat those words to themselves every morning. It’s something dreamed up by Rawls’s great-great-grandfather or somebody. Can you believe it? Saying something like that to yourself when you wake up?”

  “It’s stupid,” the younger girl said.

  “It’s dangerous, too,” Melinda replied. “Rawls had it drilled into him from the time he got out of the cradle, and when you hear something like that often enough, told to you by the people you naturally love and admire, you believe it. Especially in a family like the Rawls bunch, where there’s nothing to counter it and teach you something better.”

  “How was Rawls trying to hurt you when Daddy shot him?” Megan asked.

  “Well, in his way of thinking he wasn’t trying to hurt me. He thought it was just what men did, and it was my obligation to go along with it. I didn’t see it that way, and … ”

  “He was going to do sex stuff with you?”

  “Yes. Whether I wanted to go along or not. And I didn’t want to.”

  “Was Daddy trying to kill Rawls when he shot him?”

  “I think he was just reacting out of a father’s reflex. Trying to protect me in a situation he’d just walked into, nothing he’d expected to see.”

  “If he’d killed Rawls, he would have been in trouble, wouldn’t he?”

  “Probably so. Even if he got off the hook for it in the end, his name would have been associated with a violent killing for the rest of his life.”

  “Y’know, Melly, I used to kind of like Rawls. He seemed like he was nice.”

  “Yeah, he did, at the start. He had me fooled, anyway. He turned out not to be such a nice guy, after all,” Melinda said. “Eli, I think, is the real thing.”

  “If Eli asked you to marry him, would you say yes?”

  “I would,” Melinda replied. “Now please go back to bed. I want to sleep again.”

  “I’ll just stay here with you,” Megan said, and made herself at home on the other side of the bed.

  Melinda was too sleep-dazed to argue. She knew the days were coming when she and her little sister would not have the chance to do such sisterly things as piling up in the same bed just to be together.

  Life was changing. Not a bad thing. But change, by definition, meant difference.

  WHEN THE DRINKING, EATING and talking at Rolly Flatt’s house was over and the two Parvins told Flatt farewell and headed back out into the night, Lukey Parvin was far too drunk to drive. Then again, so was Rawls, and since they’d come in two vehicles, both drove anyway, heading from the county line to Tylerville, what lies between beware.

  Rawls was already throwing himself into his bed when Lukey pulled erratically into the parking lot of the Proud Cherokee Inn and managed to get almost properly into a parking slot. He climbed
out, not noticing that he was watched from above, a man looking down over the walkway rail not far from the door to Lukey’s room.

  Struggling to walk halfway straight, Lukey made it to the stairs, took a firm hold on the rail, and climbed. It was like a journey up Everest, every drunken footfall requiring concentration and effort.

  On the second-level walkway, Lukey clung to the rail as he headed toward his door. Then came the struggle to get out his key without dropping it, and a stumble toward the door in the wild hope he’d manage to get the key into the lock.

  He’d just managed to unlock the door when he felt the sting in his left shoulder. Thinking a bee or wasp had gotten him, he was puzzled when he looked down and saw a hypodermic needle being withdrawn from his flesh. Holding the hypodermic was a familiar face that should not there, a face Lukey had never wanted to see again.

  Lukey lurched into his room and felt himself beginning to go down as soon as he was in. He would have hit the floor if not for being caught by the same man who had just injected him.

  Jang Bo-kyung was strong and physically disciplined for a small-framed man, and with no evident strain managed to get Lukey to his bed without dropping him. He dumped and arranged Lukey on the mattress as best he could. Persuaded that Lukey was out of commission for some time to come, the Korean-American sat in a padded chair in the corner to keep his eye on Lukey, waiting for the situation to change.

  Too bad, he thought. He’d always rather liked Lukey, finding in him a distinctive hillbilly kind of charm seldom encountered on the West Coast. But Lukey had a problem. He had proven too often to be a loose cannon.

  The Flower Garden did not abide loose cannons, and Jang had been following Lukey for a good while now, under orders to deal with the Lukey Parvin problem.

  He watched Lukey sleeping in the embrace of alcohol and the drug with which he’d just been injected, and hoped he was having a good rest, for what time it would last. Unless Lukey found a way to play it uncharacteristically smart, very soon, the next rest he entered would be unending. It was Jang’s assignment to see to that, and while he was at it, also to find, if possible, a new flower for the Garden’s use.