The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  “Yeah.” I sat in a patch of sunlight to rest and warm up. “Let me call my broker.”

  “Can I buy you some lunch?” he asked.

  I shook my head no. They hadn’t fed me that morning and the last thing I’d eaten was a couple of bites of horse dick at the jail the night before. Not that I wasn’t used to going without food. I wasn’t particularly hungry. And it wasn’t the lack of sleep, something I was also used to doing without.

  I could still feel the cold of that lake, all the way down to my bones. When I closed my eyes, I could see him floating above me, his arm gently waving. I should have known before I jumped in the lake that what I saw fall in the water was no living, breathing human being. God knows I’d had enough experience. But it had been so long since I saw one of my special friends, I think he caught me by surprise.

  “Preston,” I said. Why was I about to tell him this? I already knew what he would say, but I couldn’t help myself. Preston was one of the few people in the world I could talk to. He was always honest with me. He knew my history, both legal and mental. I’d first met him after I was fired from my job with the Memphis Police Department. I wanted to sue for wrongful dismissal. Preston had advised me that my dismissal had not been wrongful.

  “I don’t think Sam Loftin killed himself,” I said.

  He looked at me over the top of his sunglasses. He was the gentlest man I never wanted to get on the wrong side of.

  “I saw him go in the water.”

  “Yes?” he sighed.

  “He was having some kind of fit. Maybe a stroke.”

  He leaned against my car and stared up into the pines. There was no wind and the air beneath the trees was heavy with the smell of dead brown needles.

  “Why would the coroner try to cover this up?”

  “Do I need to remind you that this is none of your business?” Preston asked.

  “It never is.”

  “Jackie, you know I don’t think of you as just another client, or even as an employee,” he said, still staring up into the trees. “It’s my job to make trouble go away, but your trouble never pays, except with more trouble. Trouble follows you like a dog.”

  I resented the reminder that I was a perennial liberty risk, but I needed Preston more than he needed me. “I don’t know where I’d be without you.”

  “Still in jail.” He helped me to my feet. I tried the ignition and my car started on the first crank. For once.

  Preston leaned into the window. “Your problem is, if trouble doesn’t find you, you go looking for it. And if you keep looking for it around here, you’ll find so much I may not be able to get you out of it.”

  “Bastards took my car radio,” I said. It didn’t even work, but the fact they took it pissed me off more than anything had all day.

  * * *

  I wanted to call the preacher, but I had lost my cell phone at the lake, so I drove back to my room at the Deertick Motel. The cockroaches met me at the door like dogs. Everything was pretty much as I had left it. The mildew stains might have grown a bit.

  The room actually had a working telephone. It was padlocked to a chain that was bolted to a heavy staple set in the wall. The handset was likewise chained to the body of the phone. You had to sit on the floor with your head about three inches away from the keypad. I called the preacher to try to salvage that photography job. Another week with no work and I’d be living in my car.

  A giant answered on the third ring. Even through the phone I could feel the booming power of his voice. “God bless you for calling, this is Deacon Falgoust.” He pronounced it “Fall-goo.”

  “Jackie Lyons. I’m sorry I missed our meeting yesterday.”

  “Yes, I know. Isn’t it terrible?” He didn’t have the exaggerated “Missippi guvnah” voice of your typical Southern Baptist preacher. I couldn’t place his accent at all. “If it weren’t bad enough already, they put you in jail, and after you tried to save that man. I asked Sheriff Stegall, is this how we reward our heroes? By arresting them?”

  “They let me out this morning. Thanks for vouching for me.”

  “Being as how I was late for our rendezvous, it was the least I could do.”

  After we finished apologizing to one another, I asked if there was any way I could see the house today. “Actually, I was hoping you would call,” he said. “I’m sorry to ask you to return to this house of grief, but it’s the only place I have to meet with you, and Jenny doesn’t mind. If you could be here around four-thirty, I would be much obliged to you.”

  That gave me enough time to scarf down a sandwich from the convenience store, followed by a short nap in which I dreamed I was drowning in a burning house.

  6

  AFTER A QUICK SHOWER and a change of clothes, I was passing the German gatehouse and returning to the scene of the crime. As much as I needed the money, I was starting to dread seeing Jenny Loftin again. I wasn’t ready for her questions, her grief, her kids, any of it. I just wanted the job. I parked on the street in front of the house, looked up at the levee where everything had happened. For the hundredth time, I pictured it in my mind, watched him wave, stumble and fall, then go headfirst into the lake. It didn’t make sense.

  There were no cars parked in the drive and it looked like no one was home, but I rang the bell anyway. It didn’t take them long to answer. The man who opened the door was dressed like an undertaker in a suit nearly as black as his hair. He was fortyish and handsome in a hard way, his long arms making him look taller than he really was. His smile pushed up the soft wrinkled corners of his eyes. “Hello Mrs. Lyons, I’m Deacon Falgoust.”

  “Miss.”

  When we shook, his hand felt almost fleshless. It was all bone and sinew and calluses, its strength born of something other than muscle. “I’m glad you could come,” he said. “Won’t you follow me?”

  The house was velvety quiet and dark, shades drawn. The hall led away from the door toward the back of the house, past an empty dining room on the left, half bath under the stairs on the right. I noticed that the back of the preacher’s neck above his collar was creased and sunburned. “I’m looking forward to seeing the place. How far away is it?” I asked as he led me into the spacious living room.

  Before he could answer, I was enveloped in arms. “Thank you for trying to save my Sam,” Jenny whispered in my ear. I nodded and said something about being sorry. I didn’t know what else to say to her. She hugged me like her oldest and dearest friend. I tried to return an affection I did not feel or deserve. I had only met her once, for a few minutes at a bar, half a lifetime ago. Why she remembered me, why she cared enough to try to help me, I didn’t know.

  She introduced me to her children—a boy and a girl. I’d seen the daughter, Cassie, yesterday, jumping rope. She was tiny for her eleven years and looked more like eight or nine, small-boned and pretty like her mother, with big brown eyes that stared holes through you. The boy was barely old enough to walk and would grow up with few if any memories of his father. His name was Eli. Dressed in his little black suit with a red choo-choo engine tie, he held on to the hem of his mother’s dress and shook my hand very gravely.

  Jenny hadn’t changed much since the last time I saw her, still the same girlishly pretty face and too-sharp nose, but she bore the pale, worn, faraway look you see in the eyes of tornado victims. Her lips trembled as she smiled and held me at arm’s length to look me over. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Another woman creeped into the room behind her. She looked younger than Jenny by several years and nothing like a sister, a tall, leggy brunette, dressed like everyone else (except me) in black, but hers fit her better. She didn’t need to wear heels, but she wore them anyway. She’d been in the bathroom, trying to hide her swollen dewdrop eyes and perfect little red nose under a layer of expensive powder. The only thing not gorgeous about her was her weak, thin-boned chin, but the rest more than made up for it. She slipped her hand behind the preacher’s elbow and clung to him like a tree in a flood. Jenny int
roduced her as a friend of the family—Holly Vardry.

  I said, “I’m ready to see the house whenever you are.”

  “Meemaw’s house?” Holly’s eyes widened a little too dramatically, and she gripped his arm tighter than ever as she pressed her svelte body against him.

  “Mrs. Lyons is going to photograph it,” he said as he shrugged himself free of her. It bothered me that we hadn’t even negotiated the job yet, but I decided to let that ride for now. No doubt, he could afford my services. “We can go now if you like.”

  I said I would like that very much. I could see the questions in Jenny’s eyes, questions she would find a way to ask if I hung around for very long. The preacher started for the door and I followed him.

  “Can I go with y’all?” Holly asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. As soon as we were outside, she dodged around me and sank her claws into the preacher’s arm again.

  “I hate Meemaw’s old place,” Holly said as we crossed the wide, shaded lawn.

  “If you hate it so much, why’d you come?”

  She wrinkled her nose for an answer, but I had no idea what that meant. Just before he slipped on his shades, the preacher’s glance told me he was wondering the same thing.

  * * *

  The sun was warm on our backs as we crossed the field below the levee, headed toward the woods. Tiny green grasshoppers rose up on papery wings and buzzed away in long arcs. We walked between the twin corrugated tracks left by some bulldozer ages ago. Holly had a difficult time of it in her heels, so she kicked them off and left her shoes lying in the weeds. I thought about going back and picking them up. They probably cost more than my weekly rent.

  As we entered the woods, the air seemed to lift and draw away, as though we’d climbed to a different altitude. Long ranks of trunks, brown and gray with lichen, towered away into numinous green clouds of foliage overhead. Wild grape vines as thick as my leg swung in long curves from branch to branch.

  A footpath wound its way through the undergrowth, crossed a dry creek by way of a single log and began to rise up. Dozens of other paths split off from it at irregular intervals—deer trails, the preacher called them, but all I saw was a few old beer cans hiding under the leaves.

  Eventually, a green mound loomed up through the woods ahead of us, like a lost pyramid in a Mayan jungle. We were almost standing on its steps before I realized it was a house, an entire antebellum ruin blanketed by decades of kudzu. Dusty vines with large, three-lobed leaves wrapped around the trunks of the columns and spread along the walls like ivy, even growing over the roof. A bit of crumbling brick chimney poked up from one end of the viny mound.

  “Kudzu can grow up to a foot a day,” Deacon said. “All the windows were bricked up years ago to keep it out of the house.” Even the fanlight above the door had been bricked over. A path of somewhat newer boards had been laid across the rotting porch, otherwise we’d have had to swing like Tarzan to get inside.

  “You want to restore this?” I asked while he unlocked the padlock that secured the door. “How long has it been since anybody lived here?”

  “A little over a year.” He opened the door and clicked on a flashlight he had brought with him. “Mrs. Ruth’s son finally convinced her to move into a nursing home.”

  “Kidnapped, you mean,” Holly said.

  “Mrs. Ruth?”

  “Ruth Vardry is Holly’s Meemaw. She owns this house, the woods, and all the land hereabouts.”

  While the exterior was a ruin, the inside of the house was merely a wreck. The main entrance staircase had fallen against the interior wall, and chunks of plaster, some bigger than me, littered the floor. A length of chain and a bit of frayed, cloth-covered wire dangled from a brass fixture overhead, the last remnant of what had probably been a crystal chandelier.

  Deacon kicked a bucket that stood in the middle of the hall, shloshing a little murky water onto the floor. In some places, the floorboards had been ripped up to reveal the bare gray earth below. “One good thing about the kudzu, it mostly keeps the rain out. Mostly.” He pushed open a door that had swollen shut in its frame. “Once the vines are cleared away, our first priority is rebuilding the roof.”

  There was a strangely familiar smell about the place, and not just of rotting wood and crumbling masonry. It was a barnlike odor, only wilder, like the cave of a bear. I’d smelled it before, somewhere, maybe way back in the lizard part of my brain. “Before she moved to the nursing home, Mrs. Ruth used to share this house with a pack of feral cats. There must have been twenty living in here with her.”

  We found a partially dismantled fireplace in a rear room of the house, its ancient bricks scattered across the floor. “It looks like you’ve already started your work,” I said to the preacher.

  “This was done long ago.” He picked up a brick and turned it over. His hands were hard as horn, the hands of a bricklayer or a carpenter, not a preacher. “Old Gus Stirling believed his father had hidden gold or silver in the chimney to keep it from the Yankees. The usual family story, you know. Mrs. Ruth refused to let anyone clean this up.”

  “Meemaw is crazy,” Holly elaborated unnecessarily.

  I photographed the fireplace. Holly hobbled barefoot across the broken bricks to pose beside it. “I used to be a model,” she said. I wondered if everybody around here was in that line of work.

  “It will cost a fortune to rebuild this place,” I said.

  “Money is no concern. The Lord has provided,” he answered, not without a touch of pride. “And I will direct the restoration myself.”

  He carried his brick into the next room, which he said had been a dining room. He pointed out a door which led to an exterior kitchen. The door stood open, but the path outside was so overgrown as to be nearly impassable.

  “Even after we clear away the kudzu, the windows will have to remain bricked up for a while. I’ve ordered some stained-glass windows brought from an old church that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina, but it will be several months before they can be delivered.”

  Next, he pointed out the walls. They were the color of old ivory, stained brown in places by seeping moisture, with a seafoam-blue paint flaking from the woodwork. As the beam of his flashlight played over the surface, I could just make out the ghosts of old landscapes and people, houses and Greek temples, horses and dogs, blue like ancient tattoos on pale, mummified skin. “This is Zuber wallpaper, from France. As you can see, the images are nearly lost. I’m hoping you can pull these out with your photos, so they can be re-created by an artist I know.”

  If anybody could work that kind of photographic magic, it was my pal Deiter Marks. He owned a small camera shop that was so exclusive, it was hardly ever open. He was usually too busy building photography equipment for NASA and the Pentagon to serve ordinary customers. I snapped a few pictures to give him something to start with.

  “It’s gonna be a lot of work, turning this place around,” I said. “You’d do better to tear it down and start over.”

  He shrugged. “That’s not an option, so we’re rebuilding it. Before I was called to the service of the Lord, I restored homes in Louisiana. I learned construction from my father. He rebuilt hundreds of homes after Camille wiped out the Gulf Coast.”

  “Deacon is a man of many talents,” Holly mooned. “He was a soldier in Iraq—the first time, not this last time.” Deacon frowned and walked away from her, but she followed him, wagging her tail. Her desperation was a thing to behold.

  “Most of the wood in here is chestnut, which can’t be replaced. I want to preserve as much of it as possible,” Deacon said as he pointed out the cornices above the doors. “The American chestnut tree was wiped out by blight in the 1930s and 40s. It has never recovered, and so much that was built with it has already been lost.”

  He dropped his brick with a hollow thump on the floor. The sound was echoed by a loud bang upstairs. “Jesus!” Holly shrieked under her breath. “God, I hate this place. It gives me the creeps!”

  When I f
irst set eyes on the dilapidated ruin, I was certain I would find a congress of ghosts inside. But since crossing the threshold, I hadn’t seen the first wisp, not even a shadow of movement in the corner of my eye. This was perhaps the strangest thing about the place—its deep and abiding emptiness. Now it seemed we weren’t so alone after all.

  A creaking noise, like footsteps, moved slowly overhead. Holly’s fingers tightened around a loose fold of Deacon’s jacket, pulling it taut as a drum.

  We followed the noise into the next interior room. Deacon’s flashlight beam crawled along the crumbling plaster of the coffered ceiling, revealing the laths beneath, and in some places tiny glowing eyes staring back. “Once the cats are gone, it doesn’t take long for the rats to move in,” he said.

  The footsteps passed over us. Deacon pointed his beam at a narrow door in the opposite corner of the room. “That door leads to the servants’ stair,” he said. Soon the stair steps behind the door began to creak, one at a time, with deliberate slowness. Holly shrank behind the preacher, doubled her death grip on his jacket, and buried her face in his back.

  “There’s nothing to fear here,” Deacon said, though I noticed the beam of his light wavering ever so slightly as it dropped to the gilded doorknob, which was, at that moment, turning.

  The door burst open and a dark figure leaped into the room. Holly screamed and I snapped its picture. At the flash from my camera, he recoiled, swearing obscenely.

  “God dammit Nathan!” Holly shrieked.

  Our intruder burst into outrageous, puerile laughter. “You should have seen your faces!” With the same long body lines and straight, dark hair, you could see he and Holly were brother and sister. His face was stronger, with a narrow, proud nose and deep-set eyes beneath dark brows. The dust and sweat stains on his white button-down shirt made me think he’d been crawling around in the attic. He collapsed with laughter, his hands on the dusty knees of his trousers.

  “You’re such a juvenile shit,” Holly said, then to me, “This is my stupid brother, Nathan. He’s retarded.”