The Covenant

by Jeff Crook

  I found my camera equipment next to a truck camper sitting up on concrete blocks. I squatted in the shade, lit a cigarette, watched the workers clearing the forest around the house. One in particular caught my eye. He was a young man, short and wiry, deeply sunburned across the back of his neck, dressed in dirty coveralls and yellow safety vest, a black cap that had nearly turned yellow with dust pulled down low over his eyes. The faded logo on his cap said GMPI. I watched him cross and recross the ground, like a man plowing a field with invisible mules, occasionally pausing to spray a line of orange paint on the dirt.

  I finished my smoke, stamped it out. He wasn’t using the normal electronic detection equipment for locating buried pipes and electrical lines. Instead, he carried a pair of thin brass divining rods in his fists, walking along with them held in front of his chest. Wherever his rods would cross, he’d stop, shift them to one hand and spray an orange arrow on the dirt with a sort of paint can on the end of a stick. Then he’d continue on, holding the rods loose so they could swing free in his hands.

  His row brought him directly to me. He removed his cap and wiped the sweat from his face with a red bandanna as big as a pillowcase. “I wish I had known it was you there, Jackie,” he said without even looking at me. I’d known Trey for several years, but you couldn’t really call us friends. In addition to being the call-before-you-dig man, he worked with Deiter at Grant-Marks Paranormal Investigations, using his dowsing rods to detect ectoplasmic residues and buried cables. Despite my own unique abilities in this sphere, Trey and I were not kindred spirits. Something about me jammed his frequencies. He tucked his handkerchief away and looked back along the line he’d just finished spraying, probably wondering if he needed to check it again owing to my psychic interference.

  “I didn’t think the house had water or gas,” I said.

  “They’s a big gas pipeline runs across this property.” He scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand and shoved his hat back on his head, revealing a stark, white forehead above the sunburn of his face. A couple of days’ worth of faint, blond stubble speckled his cheeks. “You working construction now?” he asked.

  “Photography. I’m shooting the house.”

  “You been inside it yet?”

  “Once.”

  “Nice place, huh?”

  Deacon returned from overseeing the unloading of the backhoe. “Everything OK?” he asked my friend.

  Trey spit past me, a black gob that cratered the dust next to one of his orange lines. He wiped his mouth and took up his dowsing rods. “I want to show y’all somethin’. Foller me, ’bout five paces back, if you don’t mind.” He started toward the house. After a moment’s hesitation, we followed like a pair of dutiful wives. We entered the woods and Trey angled toward a thicket that Deacon’s workers hadn’t begun to clear. As he slowed, his dowsing rods swung together in front of his chest.

  Deacon pulled his sunglasses from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Please don’t tell me the pipeline runs down here. The plans didn’t show anything in this area.”

  “Pipeline’s back yonder. This here is a tunnel,” Trey said.

  Deacon opened his eyes and blinked. “A tunnel?”

  “Rods don’t lie, man.” Trey spit again and scuffed it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Leads from the house off into the woods there. That’s how I know it’s a tunnel. Ain’t no gas, water, or sewer lines into that house, and the electricity used to come in on a pole. Only thing it could be is a tunnel.”

  I wondered if Trey’s employers knew he was using hillbilly magic to guarantee the safety of that gas pipeline. Deacon must have been thinking the same thing. “I thought you usually used some kind of machine to detect buried pipes.”

  “Got a Dynatel back in the truck. Already tried it. Won’t work on this hill.” He clicked the rods together. “I figured something was interfering, so I got out my rods. First thing I found was water. It’s all up under here.”

  Trey shifted his chew around in his jaw, his eyes wandering all over the house and the trees surrounding it. “Sometimes these old houses have their well down in the cellar. When this house was built, they probably still had trouble with Indians. I bet if you tore the walls down to the original timbers, you’d find loopholes for shooting.”

  Deacon’s face lit up at the thought of all that history, buried and hidden for who knew how many years. He slid his sunglasses back on to his nose to free his hands for talking. “The house was built in 1858. Legend says it was a dead end on the underground railroad. Escaped slaves would crawl into the cellar through ventilation holes in the back. But those who made it here never got any farther north. The strongest were disfigured and resold into slavery, the old murdered, but the women and children just disappeared.”

  “Seriously?” I asked.

  Deacon shrugged. “That’s the family legend. You know how legends are. Infant mortality was extremely high, and women died all the time while giving birth. In that time, families would lose two or three children before the age of ten. For slaves it was even higher. Men would go through two, three, sometimes four wives.”

  “It ain’t never a good idea to build a house over a well.” Trey was still stuck on whatever was bothering him about the house. “Sometimes a well can be a kind of gate into the spirit world, or hell, whatever you want to call it.”

  Deacon said, “I’ve been all over this house a hundred times and I’ve never seen any sign of a tunnel or a well.”

  “Preacher, they is things about this house you won’t see if you go over it a thousand times, not unless you got eyes to see them. I can find hidden things with my dowsing rods. And Jackie here can see them with her nekkid eyes.”

  I couldn’t tell what Deacon was thinking behind his sunglasses, couldn’t see if he was looking at me or had even heard what Trey had said. I hoped not. It would only remind him about that day on the levee. But he was looking at something quite far away.

  Trey cleared his throat and said, “Well, them lines ain’t gonna paint theyselves.”

  Deacon smiled and shook his hand. “Thank you for your help. I’ll only keep you from your work another moment. A minute ago, you said the first thing you found was water. Then you found the tunnel. What else did you find?”

  Trey shifted uncomfortably, his small hand gripped tightly in Deacon’s paw. “I can’t say for sure,” he mumbled.

  “What can you say for sure?”

  Trey started to spit, then thought better of it. He shifted his wad of tobacco to his other cheek. “I’ll tell you this, preacher. I wouldn’t walk them woods after dark, not for any money.”

  Deacon nodded, released him and strolled off in the other direction, smiling and mumbling to himself. “I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfortest me.” Soon he was pulled in a hundred directions by his people, all demanding his attention. Trey hurried back to his work, vanishing into the crowd without a backward glance at me.

  It seemed everybody was looking for something they couldn’t find. I wondered if I could find someone to help me move my equipment into the house.

  14

  I SET UP MY LIGHTS AND TRIPOD in the foyer. The tiny old Vietnamese man I’d seen earlier helped me string a power cord into the house from the circus camp. I shot everything, every inch of wall as high as eye level, with closer studies of any bit of trim or ornamentation I could find. Dust sifted down the whole time, workers moved in and out of my frame as though I wasn’t there, shifting furniture, bringing in lumber and stacking it along the walls, forcing me to pause, move, set up again and repeat the same shots. I must have worked three hours just covering two walls and not once did I see the preacher.

  When I started, I hadn’t the first clue what I was supposed to be doing. After those first three hours, I didn’t feel much smarter, but at least I had some shots to show for my time and maybe get a little bit of an advance on my pay.

  It must have been
siesta time, because they had stopped working on the roof. I only noticed because the blizzard of dust had changed to more of a flurry, with occasional sleets of loose plaster. I shook the rubble from my shoulders and continued to shoot. Other than the clicking of the camera’s shutter, the silence went on and on, and I found myself stopping more and more often to listen to it.

  I had put Deiter’s earlier warning and Trey’s half-spoken fears from my mind. Very little about the dead could frighten me anymore. I’d been seeing what you would call ghosts for most of my life. I hadn’t always dealt with them very well—in fact, they’d nearly killed me more than once. Not directly. Just their being there, visible, but only to me. It wasn’t everybody who could maintain being in both worlds at the same time, having to keep a sane face while you’re questioning some john about what happened to his hooker, listening to his lies while she’s standing there the whole time, bleeding on the rug, looking at her own brains slipping down the wall.

  My special friends had cost me my job, my marriage, any semblance of a normal life. I had tried to drive them out of my head by filling my veins with smack. I knew I wasn’t the only haunted ex-junkie in this crazy old world, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Plenty of people in my boat had eaten bullets or walked off a pier in an effort to make the voices and the visions stop. The only thing that kept me from hanging myself in a closet was the thought of hanging there forever, waiting like a spooky house decoration for the next confused little girl who had been born with a caul on her head to come along and open the door to my hell and join me there.

  I stopped shooting to listen, waiting for the rap of hammers, the endless chatter of the workers, the throb and rumble of their machines. There was nothing. I’d never felt more alone in my life. A house this old should have been choked with ghosts. It was as though something had driven them out. Driven them out and taken their place.

  When in Rome, I thought. A siesta sounded like a good idea. I shut down the lights, capped my lens, and stepped outside. The fitz of a beer bottle opening spun me around. Deacon sat in a dining room chair on the porch, leaning back against the wall like a gunslinger in an old Western. He held a dripping bottle of Abita beer out to me, an unopened one in his other hand.

  I accepted his offering and sat on the step, my legs crossed in front of me. “I don’t usually drink before five,” I lied as I took a swig.

  Deacon opened his bottle and held it up to a shaft of sunlight filtering through a hole in the roof. “I usually don’t drink after five, so we’re even.”

  I lit up and let the smoke drain out of me in a long slow sigh. It was like I’d been holding my breath for an hour. Sweat dripped from my hair into my eyes, dangled from the tip of my nose. The heat of the day had crept into the house while I worked and wrapped its woolly arms around me and clamped its thick, musty-smelling fingers over my mouth. Now a delicious bit of breeze fanned across the porch. I took another drag and felt my lungs ache from lack of abuse.

  “It’s a hot one,” Deacon said. I allowed that it could be considered warm for a day in May. He tasted his beer and set it on the porch beside his chair. I got the crazy idea that he didn’t really drink at all. I sucked mine down in about three swallows and rolled the empty bottle against my knee.

  “This kind of heat reminds me of Kuwait.” He pushed his chair away from the wall and sat with his hands on his knees, leaning forward, the big aviator sunglasses resting on his nose so that I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

  “So it’s true what Holly said. That you were in the military before you started this preaching dodge.”

  “Go Army. First Armored Division. Desert Storm. You strike me as ex-military yourself. Squid?”

  “Coast Guard.”

  “Must have been hell.”

  “I could tell you stories,” I laughed. I spent the war aboard the Cape Hazardous protecting Maryland crab boats from Saddam’s Atlantic fleet.

  “We were one of the first across the border at the beginning of the invasion. Them Iraqi boys had had the fight bombed out of them and started giving up as soon as they saw our tanks. My unit didn’t fire a shot in anger. I remember, it was about the fourteenth hour, we jumped this group of Republican Guards coming out of their fortifications and running toward us with their hands in the air. They didn’t have any weapons, but it was making the captain nervous so he told me to put a shot over their heads to make them sit down. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I misjudged the distance. Or maybe it was God directed my hand, because I killed one of those men, shot him with the fifty right between the eyes from maybe a half mile out. I couldn’t have made that shot if I tried. His head just disappeared. I’ll never forget that.”

  “It’s not something you forget,” I offered.

  “I don’t blame myself. It was an accident. We were at war and I was following orders, and on top of all that, I suspect the Good Lord guided my hand for a purpose He has yet to reveal to me. I can but trust that one day I will know His divine plan.”

  I stubbed my cigarette out on the bottom of my shoe and flicked the butt into the trash pile in front of the house. People were starting to appear from the circus camp, yawning and scratching as they made their way back to their dropped tools.

  Deacon turned his head to watch them go by. From that angle, I could see just the hint of a smile, his eyes crinkling up behind his sunglasses. “The VA doctor says I got PTSD.”

  “I take it you don’t agree?”

  He laughed a little and shrugged. “I got no nightmares, no hallucinations. Jesus freed me from my demons and I’m at peace. But I can’t forget that soldier.”

  Why this confession? What did he hope to gain? Certainly not absolution, nor even much camaraderie. I got the impression he’d spent a lot of time in musty church basements unburdening his soul to groups of perfect strangers. Maybe that was where he’d picked up this preaching gig—I’d seen it happen before, people trading dope for Jesus, one addiction for another.

  “That soldier haunts me. Sometimes when I preach, he’s sitting right there in the front pew. He’s got no head, but it’s him. He goes everywhere I go. I can’t get away.”

  A couple of Deacon’s workers passed, said hello and hollah, and went up the scaffolding like squirrels. I didn’t respond to Deacon’s confession, just sat there rolling the empty beer bottle between my palms. Pretty soon a rotted piece of roofing sailed down and landed with a crash on the garbage pile.

  “We’d better get out of the line of fire,” Deacon said.

  We retreated into the house. I turned on my camera lights and moved them to the next section of wall. The electrical cord had gotten itself wedged between a couple of loose floorboards. Deacon helped me pry it loose. “Anything like that ever happen to you?” he asked.

  “Happens all the time with these long cords.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I tried to play it cool. Lying to myself made it easier. I was good at it. I had lots of practice. I just shrugged and snapped a picture.

  “You can see the dead, can’t you?”

  I shot a couple of photos of the wall. Somewhere behind the house an air compressor cranked up. A man appeared in the rear doorway, pushing a wheelbarrow full of old bricks. He crossed the room and exited through the front door. “What makes you think that?”

  “I think you know.”

  I nodded and silently cursed Trey for an idiot. It wasn’t really his fault, even though he’d dropped that bomb about me being able to see hidden things with my nekkid eyes. It had been too much to hope Deacon had forgotten about my little prodigy on the levee.

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “I can well understand your reluctance. I rarely tell anyone about my soldier. Most people don’t understand, so we hide it in our hearts, afraid and ashamed.” He took his little black Bible out of his back pocket and began shifting through the soft pages. “But there’s nothing to be ashamed of. The Apostle Paul wrote in his first epistle to the C
orinthians, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit is given to each accordingly, for to one is given words of wisdom, to another words of knowledge, to another great faith, to another the gift of healing, to another prophecy, and to another the discerning of spirits.”

  “You think this is some kind of gift?”

  He put his hand on my arm, gently cupping the elbow, as though about to help me across a busy street. “I have counseled others who are haunted by the dead, Jackie Lyons. Most of them, like you, believe it to be a curse rather than the gift it truly is.”

  I extracted my elbow from his hand.

  “But it shows that the Lord favors you above all others! And if it can bring some comfort to Jenny Loftin, and perhaps a measure of justice to her family, would that not make it a gift?”

  “Justice?”

  “You know as well as I do, but for very different reasons, that Sam Loftin didn’t kill himself.”

  I just shrugged. Maybe I did know. Or maybe I didn’t have a clue. I reminded myself, this was none of my business. It certainly wasn’t any of Deacon’s business what I knew or didn’t know.

  “For the last year, I have counseled Sam and Jenny. In some ways I know them better than they know themselves. Sam loved his daughter Reece and still grieved for her, but he had living children that he loved equally, and he was devoted to Jenny. He wouldn’t take himself from them.”

  “Did he have life insurance?”

  Deacon nodded. “And the insurance company won’t pay if it’s suicide.”

  So that was why they needed me—to help complete the profile of a man who had no intention of killing himself, to dangle before Jenny Loftin a strand of hope, however thin, that her husband’s death was anything but suicide.