The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  Framed photos hung on every wall and stood on tables and bookshelves all around the room—glamour shots of Ruth going back decades, some even to World War II and maybe earlier. In the later color photographs, she was even more beautiful than in her younger, Hollywood pictures. She had a face to launch a thousand ships, a beauty to bring an empire to ruin. I wondered how a veritable Roxana had been born from such quintessential clodhopper stock.

  She noticed me admiring her pictures. “Do you like them?”

  Deacon said, “Jackie is a photographer. She’s going to take the pictures of your house before we start the restoration.”

  “Are you, now? Well. Take a look at this, then.” She stretched her long arm over the back of the divan and took a framed photo from the piano against the wall. In it, she wore a tight, short-skirted Little Bo Peep outfit and was holding a crook between her legs while she cuddled a lamb. “That was taken by Irving Klaw,” she said.

  “Didn’t he shoot the Bettie Page photos?”

  “Some of them.” She seemed pleased that I had heard of him.

  I set the photo on the coffee table and crossed the room to the largest portrait. It was a full-length deal, nearly as tall as me. In it, Ruth couldn’t have been more than sixteen, though you’d have lost money guessing her age in any decade, from what I could tell. She wore a dark dress that clung like spiderwebs to her slim, straight body. She was turned away from the camera, her hair flowing down her bare back almost to her hips. The logo in the corner said MGM. “You didn’t look like the typical pinup girl, Mrs. Vardry.”

  “I wasn’t. But not every man has typical tastes.”

  “Were you in movies?” I asked.

  “None that you’ve ever seen. They didn’t show my pictures on The Late Late Show.” She laughed, then coughed, covering her mouth with a thin hand while she wheezed and gasped.

  Deacon reached down beside the divan and checked the valve on her oxygen tank. When she had recovered, she tugged at the tube beneath her nose. With surprising tenderness, Deacon knelt and tightened the strap that held it to her face. “I hate that I have to wear this thing,” she said.

  “It’s for your own good, Mrs. Ruth.”

  “I just feel so damned helpless. I’ve never been so helpless in all my life.” Despite her protestations, she obviously enjoyed being ministered to by the handsome preacher from Louisiana. She groped him with her eyes. He cupped her face in his hands and she leaned forward and moistened her lips with her tongue, but he only adjusted the tube to best feed oxygen to her starving lungs.

  “If I was ten years younger…” she breathed.

  “I’d be foutre,” he said as he stood.

  “I don’t know what that means, but I like the way you say it.” She leaned back on the divan and looked at me as though I had just appeared. “So you’re a photographer,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Dear God, I’m not a ma’am. Call me Ruth, please.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Ruth,” I said, copying the preacher.

  “Have you seen my house?”

  “I’ve been through it once.”

  “How does it look to you?”

  “Pretty run-down. I’ve lived in worse.”

  “Did you see anything there that interested you?” I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, whether she had caught my look of surprise upon entering her room and finding it full of ghosts, or if she was talking about something, or someone, else.

  “It must have been a beautiful place, once,” I said.

  “Maybe, but not in my lifetime,” she sighed.

  “But it will be again, when I’m done with it,” Deacon said. He told Mrs. Ruth about the house in New Orleans he’d salvaged. “We got two entire levels of wood flooring that stayed above the flood, and a flatbed loaded with trim and doors and windows, every bit of it chestnut.”

  Ruth’s eyes glowed as he described how he would return the old ruin to its former glory. “I hope I am spared long enough to see it the way you see it, Deacon,” she sighed when he was done. “To tell you the truth, I would like to see it now. Just one more time.”

  “Now Mrs. Ruth,” he said.

  “You could take me.” She plucked at the sleeve of his jacket, clinging to him just like I’d seen her granddaughter do the day of the wake. “Luther wouldn’t have to know.”

  “You know that’s not possible.” He gently untangled himself and folded her hands across her breast. She lay back and closed her eyes, her chest rising and falling in tiny, rapid pants. Even with the oxygen, it was all she could do to get her breath.

  Her eyes still closed, she said, “Jackie Lyons.”

  “Yes ma … Ruth?”

  “I want to see the pictures.”

  Deacon cranked up her oxygen, then rested his big, sunburned hand on her forehead, feeling for a temperature. “I will pay you,” she added.

  He knelt at her side and, with his hand still covering her eyes, bowed his head and began to pray. I tried not to listen, but it wasn’t like any prayer I’d ever heard in my mother’s church. No craven cowering or appeals to the Almighty to work His grand magic on this worthless flesh—it was more like a conversation between three people, one of whom I was not presently privileged to see or hear. Maybe they could hear Him, or maybe it was just the soft, melodic sound of Deacon’s voice, or maybe it was the oxygen hissing from the tank, but Ruth’s breathing gradually evened out.

  When the preacher had said amen and stood, Ruth opened her eyes. There were no tears quivering, no peace bringing healing sleep, only bitterness, the helpless anger of a strong woman betrayed by an old age she didn’t feel in her heart. “It was my house. I was supposed to die there, but they took me away and locked me up in this place. I want to see it again. You will help me do that, Jackie Lyons.”

  It wasn’t a request, but I answered, “Yes ma’am,” because I couldn’t call her Ruth any more than I could call my mother Lucy.

  12

  But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

  — SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES”

  I RETRIEVED MY CAMERA from the front desk and left without getting any photographs of Preston’s client. He was going to have to file a court order before Nurse Ratched would let me see what was hidden in her chamber of horrors. She had made sure to delete all the photos from the camera’s memory. I wondered how much they paid her to be so thorough. Not nearly enough, I guessed by her faded scrubs and worn-out shoes. She was only too happy to do it for free, anyway.

  Deacon agreed that I could start shooting that afternoon, so I stopped by Deiter’s to pick up the equipment I’d need. Deiter Marks’s camera shop was tucked away in a nondescript converted residence on a small street just off Memphis’s busiest retail corridor. Most of the time his place wasn’t even open, and he didn’t bother posting his hours on the door.

  He was best known as one-half of Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigations. In his spare time, he and a few of his closest lunatics liked to hang around abandoned mental hospitals and Civil War battlefields trying to record the voices of the dead. Deiter was one of the few people in the world I’d told about my ability to see ghosts. He once admitted to being intensely jealous. In all his years hanging out in cemeteries, he’d never seen the first spirit. Graveyards, I told him, were usually empty.

  Deiter met me at the door wearing a pair of paisley pajama bottoms and a quilted housecoat he had stolen from somebody’s grandmother, one pocket of which was stuffed with oatmeal cream pies, the other with empty plastic wrappers. He was just finishing a pie as he opened the door. He wiped his hands on his hay-colored beard and welcomed me inside.

  I told him why I’d come and he quickly set about dragging things from the pack rat’s nest that filled the front of his camera s
hop. He laid at my feet a tripod, lights, light stands, reflective screens—everything I needed to complete the photo shoot. None of it was new and some of it was held together with duct tape, but it was easily a thousand dollars’ worth of photographic equipment.

  “I’ll pay you after I get paid,” I said.

  He pushed one of his flippers at me and rolled his eyes. “You do me a favor taking this junk out of here. I’m up to my eyes, I can hardly move.” He seemed to move around the place just fine, despite his bulk and the clutter stacked to the ceiling. He could put his hand on exactly what he wanted almost with his eyes closed. My expensive little pile hadn’t made a visible dent in his hoard.

  “Speaking of,” I said as I dug a CD out of my back pocket. “See what you can do with these.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Photos of some old, faded wallpaper that’s supposed to be really rare.”

  “Zuber?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’ve only ever seen reproductions.” He tucked the disk into the waistband of his pajamas. “I’ll do my best, but you really should have used infrared.”

  Deiter helped me load the case with all my equipment in the trunk. The morning was growing hot, hard beams of sunlight dropping through the trees, and Deiter was dripping by the time we finished, big dark stains under his pits. I offered him a smoke, but he waved it away in favor of another oatmeal cream pie. He folded the whole thing into his mouth and tucked the empty plastic wrapper in the other pocket of his housecoat. “Those things are bad for you,” he said of my cigarette.

  I shrugged and blew a cloud of smoke at the clouds. The sky was a perfect shade of blue, blotted with fluffy white clouds in perfect symmetry, as though painted by some obsessive-compulsive deity.

  “So where’s this big job?” he asked.

  I told him about the preacher’s plan to restore Mrs. Ruth’s antebellum home. I knew he’d be interested, but his face grew grim when I mentioned the name of the place. He shook his head and folded another pie into the hole in his beard. “That place is bad. Have you seen it already?” I said that I had. “And you didn’t notice anything … anyone … you know what I mean?”

  “I thought I would.” I took another drag, remembering my first view of the place. Stirling Plantation should have been a neon-lit Vegas for creatures that went bump in the night. I had expected to find it as crowded as a casino. “There was nothing there. Nothing dead, anyway.”

  “That’s damn strange,” he said, shaking his head again.

  “Why?”

  “It has a black history. Some bad shit happened there a long time ago.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a historian.”

  “Well,” I said in a cloud of smoke, “maybe it was so long ago the house has forgotten.”

  He leaned close, his breath sweet-smelling, like cake. “Some guys I know—a rival group of paranormal investigators—went out there last year after the owner, what’s her name?”

  “Ruth Vardry.”

  “… moved out. They didn’t have permission, but they wanted to see if the stories were true, took a shitload of video equipment to try to film it. They thought they’d make a movie and sell it for a million bocks. Two weeks later I heard they quit, closed down their website. Two sold their house and moved to Montana.”

  I laughed, crushed the cigarette under my heel. “Are you trying to scare me, Deiter?” I climbed in my car.

  He closed the door and bent down beside the window, his man-boobs hanging out of his housecoat. “I’m focking serious, Jackie. Be careful out there. It’s a long way from Memphis.”

  I started the car. “I will be.”

  * * *

  Deacon met me that afternoon in front of Jenny’s house. I hadn’t seen her since the night I snuck away, and I dreaded running into her again. Her house looked abandoned, nobody parked in the driveway or peeking through the curtains as I pulled up.

  Deacon was wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses, his shirt stuck to his chest and little trickles of moisture ran down the back of his neck, soaking his collar. The meadow beyond was like an open oven door. A mirage of heat rose off the levee rocks, but thankfully no ghosts.

  “Is it always this hot in May around here?” he asked as I killed the engine.

  “Sometimes. Can you help me with this?” I opened the trunk.

  “For a minute I mistook I was back home in Louisiana.” He grabbed one end of the heavy case and lifted it out, hoisted it onto his shoulder as though it were a basket of bread and started off.

  He led the way down into the woods, picking out the path through the brambles, which seemed to have doubled in size in the month since I last passed this way. Unseen creatures skittered through the undergrowth at our approach. As we crossed the dry creek by the log bridge, I asked, “Is this where the lake runs out?”

  He stood balanced on the log with the heavy case on his shoulder, pointing away into the woods. “The big lake is up yonder ways. The spillway comes out on the other side of the hill. This creek is from a smaller pond away there in the woods, called Spring Lake, fed by artesian springs. If you go a hundred yards up the creek, you’ll find a boulder with a hollow place worn out of the stone where slaves used to wash their clothes.”

  We hadn’t gone far up the next hill when we started to hear the angry droning of chainsaws and grumbling of heavy engines. Deacon stopped again and set my case on the ground. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and toweled the back of his neck.

  “Here’s the old scuppernong arbor.” He walked toward a small but densely overgrown thicket of vines. “My workers found it this morning. It’s original to the house, planted before the Civil War. They were about to chop it down when I stopped them.” Old muscadine covered in furry black bark, arched over to form a leafy cave against the hillside. I noticed something hanging just inside the entrance, something that moved as we drew near.

  “There’s a big damn bat in there,” I said.

  “That’s not a bat, he is un rat de bois—rat of the woods. Jackie Lyons, meet my guard possum, Paul. At night, he comes up to the house and wanders around the rooms.” Deacon stepped under the arbor and reached up to stroke the creature. It was hanging by its tail from a vine. At Deacon’s touch, it opened its mouth and yawned, a nightmare of teeth.

  “The Opossum Paul?” I asked.

  “Do you think God will strike me dead?” He scratched the prehistoric monster between its ears. “He’s his own little dude.”

  We continued up the hill, and it wasn’t long before I began to smell diesel smoke. The undergrowth suddenly gave way and the forest opened out on either side of the path. Before us rose the house, stripped of its kudzu mantle, lying naked and gray beneath the sun like a Greek ruin. A dozen men were busy tearing off the roof and jettisoning the rotted lumber over the side. More men were clearing undergrowth with chainsaws and sling blades, women and kids dragging briars up out of the woods to throw into the scoop of a bulldozer that sat idling on the slope of the hill. A pillar of gray smoke rose into the sky behind the house, somewhere beyond the trees.

  “As soon as we get all this cleared out, we’ll run new water, sewer, and gas lines up to the house.” Deacon set my case on the ground beside what appeared to be an old brick-paved drive or loop. The bricks were green with moss and nearly buried in the deep loam.

  “Who are all these people?” I asked. There were dozens, and everywhere I turned I saw more. Several had noticed our arrival and raised their hands in greeting. Some dropped their work and headed our way.

  Deacon spread his arms as though to embrace them all. “These are my saints, the congregation of my church. Most of them were scattered by the hurricane, but after Mrs. Ruth deeded us this property, I sent out word and they came. See how much we have already accomplished, with the Lord’s help?”

  The whole hillside had been transformed. It was already starting to look like a place where somebody could live
—if you knocked down the house first. Without its veil of kudzu you could see just how close it was to collapsing upon itself.

  We continued up the hill, now surrounded by a swarm of Deacon’s saints, all crying his name in an apparent ecstasy of joy. Two took my camera case and carried it along. I counted half a dozen different languages in the first five minutes, a veritable Babel of Creole-speaking Cajuns, Asians, Mexicans, Jamaicans and Haitians.

  A tottering old Vietnamese man came out of the house and called Deacon over to the porch. They huddled together and Deacon read something from the worn red-letter edition of the King James Bible that was always in his hand or his back pocket. Next, the children gathered, dangling from his arms like parrots. Now the women came and shyly took his hands and drew him away to where they were steaming tamales and boiling crawfish over open fires. They had set up a weird, circuslike encampment on the edge of the woods, rusting campers and tattered pop-ups and pickup trucks with camper shells, scores of dogs and chickens, goats staked out and bleating like tiger bait, and more half-naked children than anyone could count. They surrounded Deacon, dancing, clapping, kissing his hands and singing. He walked among them, his arms lifted as though riding a human wave.

  I looked around until I found several Coleman coolers under a folding table. Deacon finally worked himself free of his followers and found me digging through the slushy ice. “Do you want a cold drink?” he asked.

  I shook icy water from my hand. “Just wondering where you keep the Kool-Aid.”

  13

  GRADERS AND BULLDOZERS scraped the earth beyond Deacon’s circus camp, leveling the hills and preparing a place where, in a few days, they would begin pouring the concrete foundations for his church. With a stick, he scratched out the plan in the dust for me: sanctuary, entrances, baptistery, offices, fellowship hall, food pantry, job-training school. I was anxious to start work in the house. Before he had a chance to give me the grand tour, I was rescued by the arrival of a flatbed truck bringing in another backhoe. Deacon hurried away to show them where to off-load.