“So that was that. Except his ghost still haunts the church, right?”
“I guess the Potters and the Mathesons and the Buchanans started feeling a little guilty and decided that maybe ‘an eye for an eye’ was all fine and dandy, but once a sin was paid for, all was forgiven. They buried him out in the woods, covered him with rocks in a place long forgotten. But they said prayers over his grave even if he didn’t deserve them. They even took care of the woman he got pregnant.”
The police scanner squawked, and a female dispatcher’s voice came over. “Ten-sixty-eight. Ten-sixty-eight on Old Turnpike Road.”
The tension in Littlefield’s office eased slightly. “Denny Eggers’s cows got out again,” Littlefield said.
A deputy on patrol responded to the call. “Ten-four, base. Unit Four, en route.”
“Ten-four,” said the dispatcher. The scanner returned to broadcasting its ambient hiss.
The sheriff looked at Storie. She stood and stretched. “Well, I’d better get out to the church and see if I missed anything yesterday,” she said.
She was at the door, with her hand on the knob, when Littlefield spoke. “The woman he got pregnant brought flowers to his grave. They say that three days after the hanging, she came running out of the woods with tears in her eyes, her clothes torn by the tree branches. She said, ‘Praise God, the stone’s been rolled away.’ “
Detective Storie didn’t turn around. The sheriff continued, his words spilling over each other, as if he were experiencing an attack of nausea and wanted it to pass. “When she said that, the church bell started ringing. Only the bell had no rope. And nobody was in the church at the time.”
Storie turned. “So that’s why you told me all this. That’ll really stand up in court.” She dropped her voice into a low, professional delivery. “ ‘Your Honor, I would like to submit as state’s evidence thirty-two a tape recording of church bells ringing, made on the night of Mr. Houck’s death.’ “
Littlefield stared into the black pool of his cup of coffee. “Maybe all that has nothing to do with Boonie’s death. I sure as hell hope not. A psycho might be able to hide out in the woods for a few weeks, but the bloodhounds would get him sooner or later. Same with a mountain lion. But I hear that one of McFall’s descendants is back in town.”
“So you expect me to believe in coincidence?” she said. “They didn’t teach paranormal investigation at the academy. As for Reverend McFall’s ghost, I’ll believe it when you can prove it in court.”
“I’ve got an eyewitness for you,” he said, his voice tired now, an old man’s defeated voice.
“Who?”
He glanced at the Officer of the Year award, glinting dully in the morning sun that sliced through the parted blinds. Storie approached his desk. She leaned over it in a position of superiority, like a teacher berating a daydreaming student.
“Who?” she repeated. “Who’s going to testify that a ghost committed murder?”
“Me.”
SIX
“You?” Storie shook her head.
Littlefield sat back, feeling twice his forty years. The good thing about the past was that you left it farther and farther behind each day. The bad thing was that you also got closer to the day when you could no longer hide from the past. A day of reckoning and judgment.
“I was seventeen,” he said, his flesh cold. “It was Halloween night. Back then, and probably still to this day, getting drunk and driving over to the red church was the thing to do on Halloween. Me and a few of my high school buddies loaded into a pickup I borrowed from my dad. Well, my kid brother Samuel, he was eleven at the time, saw the beer in the bed of the pickup and said he was going to tell on me.”
Littlefield rubbed his eyes. He wasn’t going to let himself cry in front of a woman or another cop. He cleared his throat. “So I told him he could come along if he’d keep his stupid little mouth shut. We went out to the church—we only lived about two miles away, up near the McFalls at the foot of Buck-horn—and parked in the trees off to one side of the graveyard. We drank the beer and dared each other to go inside the church, you know how teenagers will do.”
“Sure I do,” Storie said. “I just never expected you to have been such a scofflaw.”
Littlefield wasn’t sure if her sarcasm was designed to provoke him or encourage him to continue. But he’d kept the story bottled up for too long. He’d never had anyone to confide in.
“Naturally, we were all too scared to do it. Like I said, the ghost stories were pretty well known in these parts. Which was funny as hell, because that’s where most of us went to church on Sundays. During the day, with all the people there and the sun in the windows, it wasn’t scary at all. But at night, with the dark shadows of the woods, your imagination had a lot of room to play.
“So then we got to picking on Samuel, calling him a chicken, as if we were any braver. And, damn me, I was as bad as any of the others. Samuel sat in the bed of that pickup truck, his eyes wide and shiny in the moonlight and his Up quivering. What else could he do but go up to the church?”
Storie leaned against the wall. The sheriff glanced at her, but she was staring at the floor, looking uncomfortable. She was a cop. Maybe she was as emotionally inhibited as he was and hated this type of intimacy. Well, she could walk out if she wanted. Now that he had started, he was going to finish the story, even if the walls and God were his only audience.
“He went across the graveyard, wearing a cape that was part of his trick-or-treating getup. He was Batman that year, and the cape was a beach towel tied in a knot around his neck. Maybe as he walked, he tried to convince himself that he was a brave superhero.”
Littlefield closed his eyes, and it was as if an October wind had carried him back to that night. He could almost smell the freshly fallen leaves, the sweetness of the late autumn grass, the beer that had spilled in the truck bed, the smoke from the cigarettes one of the boys smoked. He continued in a monotone.
“By the time he passed those lonely tombstones, I started feeling a little guilty. I jumped out of the truck and ran across the graveyard to get him and drag him away. I hollered, and I guess he thought I was going to do something to him. He ran up the steps and lifted the latch to the church door, then went inside. The rest of the guys were hooting and moaning, making ghost noises while trying not to snicker.
“I followed Samuel inside the church and closed the door behind me. That’s when I got the idea. ‘Let’s scare the bejesus out of them,’ I said, mad at the other guys mostly because I was so much like them. The entryway was dark, but the moonlight spilled through the belfry and lit up that little square where the bell rope used to hang. The hole was about two feet by two feet, too small for most people to squeeze through. But Samuel was slender and wiggly, so I knew he could slip through there if I boosted him up.”
Unit Four’s voice came through on the police radio and interrupted Littlefield’s story. “Come in, base. Found the cows, all right. Denny’s getting them rounded up. I’ll be ten-ten for a few—”
Storie crossed the room and cut off the radio, then turned back to Littlefield. Her eyes flicked to the sheriff’s face, then away, as if she were as ashamed of his vulnerability as he was.
He continued. “I told him, ‘Get up there and hide, and I’ll run out screaming and say that the Bell Monster got you.’ He must have been scared, but I’d always been his hero, and I guess he trusted me that everything would be okay, that nothing bad could happen while I was there. So I boosted him up, and he scrambled through, then I saw his pale face framed in the rope hole. ‘When I wave my arms, you kick the bell,’ I said. He nodded, and I ran outside, waving my arms and screaming like a crazy man.
“ ‘It got him, it got him,’ I yelled. ‘The Bell Monster got him.’ And all those drunken guys jumped out of the pickup and took off running down the road. I turned and pointed to the belfry, signaling Samuel to ring the bell. I saw his eyes, his white forehead, and the dark mess of his curly hair. And behind him
, behind him . . .”
Littlefield took three swallows of cold black coffee. He looked at the sunlight sneaking around the window shade. He’d never told anybody this part. Except for himself. He’d relived it during a thousand sweaty, sleepless nights.
“The Bell Monster was there,” he said, his whisper filling the room.
“It was really just a shadow, but it was there. It had sharp edges, and it moved toward Samuel. I screamed for real then, and I guess Samuel thought it was part of the act. Then he turned around and saw the thing, God only knows what it looked like from that close up. He scrambled over the edge of the belfry and started to slide down the roof. It was a short drop, he should have been fine. But that stupid cape got caught on a nail or something, and I heard the pop from clear across the graveyard.” Littlefield’s whisper dropped a notch quieter. “His neck broke.”
Littlefield could still see Samuel’s startled expression, his eyes and tongue bulging as his body spun beneath the eave of the church. The image had been burned into his retinas, coming to him in dreams and while awake, crisper than a high-definition television signal, more vivid than any movie.
Storie came to him and put a hand on his forearm. “I’m sorry.”
The tears came now, hot and wet and stinging, but not enough to flush away the image of his dead brother’s face. “We buried him there at the church. Sometimes I think that’s the worst part, that we left him buried there forever. The place got what it wanted. The place got him.”
Littlefield wiped his nose on his sleeve. “And here I am, blubbering like an idiot.”
Storie came closer. “It’s okay, Frank,” she said, and for a moment he thought she was going to hug him. That would be the final humiliation. He spun so that the back of his chair was facing her.
“I saw him,” he said.
“I know. It must have been awful.”
“No, not Samuel. I saw him. Right when Samuel’s neck broke, I saw the Hung Preacher. Just for a second. He shimmered there at the end of a rope, hanging from that goddamned dogwood tree that I’ve never had the nerve to chop down. He was looking at me like he knew what he’d done. And he was mighty damned pleased with himself.”
Littlefield was deflated, tired. He was sorry he’d said anything. How could he expect anyone to believe what he barely believed himself? He knew what had happened that night. He’d seen it with his own eyes. But that night existed as if in a separate reality, a private hell, apart from the safe and sane world of Pickett County.
“Did any of your drinking buddies witness anything?” Storie asked.
Damn her. Of course she’d want hard evidence. A broken soul wasn’t enough to convince her. His anger dried his eyes.
“No,” he said, staring at a drug-prevention poster on the wall. “Officially, it was a prank that turned into a tragedy. Freak accident. Of course, the old-timers muttered and added Samuel’s death to the legend of the red church. The rest of the world went on with the business of living.”
“Except you,” Storie said.
Except me. Storie did have a detective’s eyes. Littlefield ran his hand over his scalp and stood. “Well, now you know your sheriff is apeshit crazy.”
“The eyes can play tricks. In my psychology classes, they taught us that bad memories can trigger—”
Littlefield sliced his palm across the air to silence her. “I don’t give a damn about theories. I know what I saw.”
She clenched her fists and looked at him, the hurt clear on her face. She hurried out of the office, and he did nothing to stop her. She slammed the door, and Littlefield’s Officer of the Year award rattled in its case.
Elizabeth McFall, known to the old families as Mama Bet, knelt in the damp forest soil.
The dead belong to the dirt. And the dirt belongs to Him that shaped it all.
The dirt would have her soon enough. She was nearly eighty, suffering from diabetes, cataracts, and high blood pressure. But at least God allowed her legs to work still, and her mind was a lot clearer than her eyesight. She looked through the treetops, at the blue sky and the invisible kingdom waiting behind it.
A hand touched her shoulder.
“You done yet, Mama Bet?”
It was Sonny Absher, the biggest small-time thief this side of Tennessee. She hoped his sins didn’t jump onto her, like lice or fleas jumping to greener pastures.
The worst part of this whole business was that the Abshers were in on it. The Buchanans were bad enough, what with their moonshining and wife-beating and chicken-stealing ways. But at least the Buchanans knew how to get down on their knees and say they were sorry. The Abshers would just as soon spit at God, even if the saliva fell right back onto their oily faces.
But the Abshers couldn’t be culled from the congregation. All the families had a hand in the original persecution, and they all carried a common debt in their hearts. After all these years, they were practically of the same blood anyway. And that blood would have to spill, and spill, and spill.
“I’ll be done shortly,” Mama Bet answered. “Gotta suffer a little, get right down here on my knees and feel a little pain.”
“So this is where they buried him?”
Mama Bet bowed over the small pile of stones. “Yeah. But without a body, a grave’s just a hole in the ground.”
Sonny Absher snorted. She could smell the white lightning on his breath, in his clothes, strong enough to drown out his rancid sweat. “You mean you believe all that bullshit about Wendell McFall coming back from the dead?”
“You better hush yourself,” Mama Bet said, shrugging his hand away from her shoulder. “God might strike you down. Look what He done to Boonie.”
“God’s done and struck me,” Sonny said. “He got me born here. Why in hell else would I be part of this bunch?”
Sonny drew a cigarette from his stained shirt pocket, lit it, and blew a gray cloud of smoke to the sky. He retreated to a stand of laurels, where his brother Haywood and Haywood’s wife and teenage daughter waited. Stepford Matheson sat on a stump, whittling on a little chunk of white ash.
Haywood had tried to aspire to a little dignity, taking up with the Baptists and selling insurance in Barkersville. His hands were folded in reverence, but he didn’t fool Mama Bet. A person of true faith didn’t believe in insurance. But Haywood was all show anyway. His retail-rack suit swamped his skinny frame.
You put a weasel in a forty-dollar suit, and you get a forty-dollar weasel. And Nell ain’t quite got all the ingredients to be a trophy wife. I mean, a quart of makeup and a weekly trip to the hair salon ought to give better results than that. Why, I’ve seen better eyeliner jobs down at Mooney’s Funeral Home.
Mama Bet turned back to the loose pile of stones that marked her great-grandfather’s former resting place.
Forgive me, God, for thinking ill of others. I guess I suffer the sin of pride. I’m just a little shaky, is all. Scared. You can understand, can’t You?
Sure, God could understand. God was really the blame for this whole mess, when you got right down to it. God was the one who put those fool notions in Wendell McFall’s head. God was the one who put temptation in Wendell’s path. God was the one who sat right up there in the clouds and didn’t lift a finger while Wendell sliced up that pretty little girl.
God sat right there and laughed. And God laughed the night He slipped His seed into Mama Bet’s belly. Oh, yes, God was a sneaky little devil, all right. Came to her in the dark and made her forget all about it after.
Until she missed a few of her monthlies. Her belly had started to swell and her breasts grew heavy with milk. Everyone thought she had suffered a sin of the flesh, had fallen in with one of those door-to-door Bible salesmen who had a reputation for rutting like stallions going after a pent-up mare. And so the little hens clucked, Alma Potter and Vivian Matheson and all the other no-good gossips of Whispering Fines.
She didn’t tell anybody she was still a virgin. Then, now, and forever, as far as she could tell. Virgins couldn’t
get pregnant, could they? Only one had in the whole history of the world, the way the Bible told it.
Mama Bet delivered the baby without help, had strained and groaned and screamed for twenty hours, as her water burst and her uterine walls spasmed. God forgive her, she had even cussed that baby’s Father. Borrowed every bad word in the Absher repertoire, then added a few of her own. Finally that slimy head popped through, followed by little shoulders and arms and belly and legs.
Can a body love something so much that her heart aches with the loving?
She had often wondered. Because she fell in love with that child, she pulled him onto her belly and then hugged him against her face, her tears running like whatever was leaking from her broken place down there. Her whole world, her whole reason for living, was realized in that moment after birth.
“How long you going to pray over that damned old pile of rocks?” Sonny called.
“Shut up,” Haywood said.
Mama Bet slowly rose to her feet, pushing on the mossy stones for support. Haywood started forward to help her, but she waved him away.
“I get my strength from God and Archer,” she said.
Oh, yes, it was strength, all right. The strength born of stubbornness and determination. God was the worst absentee father of all time. Because He never really just showed up and did His business, never made this or that happen directly, though He had His hand in every little breath that human beings took. He kept Himself invisible, because He wanted nary bit of the blame when things went wrong. That was why He’d planted the seed and sneaked away in the night without even leaving an instruction manual on how to raise a messiah.
Mama Bet peeled her scarf back and let it rest around her neck. The sun was high enough to break through the canopy of forest. The leaves weren’t at full size yet. Otherwise, the grave would be in the shadows all day. Mama Bet took a deep swallow of the fresh mountain air. She could taste the past winter’s ice and the coming summer’s oak blooms in the same breath.
Round and round these dadgummed seasons go. Seems like they get faster and faster, mixing together and not stopping to rest, like the world’s in a great big hurry to get to the reckoning.
The Red Church Page 7