He sat in his office before a glowing computer monitor, his brow furrowed with the effort of concentration. This was very different from report writing, wherein he was required to report facts without any taint of personal feeling. Now this long-denied process of feeling was the only message he had to impart.
Twice he had attempted to abandon the project, stomped around the office cursing his sensibilities, and twice he had gulped down a mug of half-life coffee and set to the task again.
Dear Ms. Judd, he had typed at the top of the page. To the right of that he had tapped out 100
Dear Mama Judd, and farther along the same line was the simple salutation Dear Naomi. It was hard to decide what to call her, this total stranger that he knew so well. How odd that she should know nothing of him.
Hepatitis. He turned the word over in his mind, trying to find some justification for its presence in the life of a country singer. He had looked it up in one of the office reference books, and found a general definition that did little to satisfy his bewilderment. How do you offer sympathy to a total stranger facing the ultimate tragedy? Was he being impertinent to even try? Of course, the irony of it was that Naomi Judd didn't feel like a stranger at all to him. Why, he had blood kin cousins that were more strangers to him than Naomi was. He knew less about the cousins, and cared not at all. The country-music station announced her birthday each year, and a host of articles detailed her life, from her decor and favorite colors down to the mundane details of her Ashland, Kentucky, childhood. Naomi Judd was the embodiment of a fairy tale: a female Elvis, if you will.
She was still a teenager when her daughter was born, and for twenty years thereafter she'd lived in obscurity, training as a nurse, and raising her kids, with no more celebrity than he had. Then one day, when Wynonna was grown, they had taken a shot at the music business, singing together in a husky, melodious counterpoint. "Mama He's Crazy": That was the first hit, a perfect combination of song and publicity. People said, Here's a mother-daughter act 101
singing this song, and you can't tell which is which. They had ridden that riddle to stardom, getting more beautiful and more polished as they went along.
And now it was over, because of some defect you couldn't even see, destroying the Judds from the inside out. She still looked perfect. He'd seen her on a Barbara Walters interview, and no one could look more likely to live forever.
Spencer looked up at the Judds poster above his desk. Was it Naomi's mortality that frightened him, or his own? He could remember when death was confined to old people that his parents were vaguely acquainted with. Then, as he grew older, death had begun to cut a swath through his parents' circle of friends, finally reaching Hank Arrowood himself. And interspersed through this steady attrition were the shocking accidents that claimed those his own age: his brother, Cal, killed in Vietnam; a football teammate lost in a car accident; a childhood playmate stricken with leukemia. These, though, he saw as random examples of bad luck, visiting his generation for form's sake; the majority of them, though, were going to live forever.
The illness of Naomi Judd said otherwise. Nothing will save you, it whispered. Not fame, or optimism, or wealth, or physical fitness, or other people's love. We can get you anytime we want, and you will be powerless against us. Contemplating the randomness of death made Spencer uneasy. He did not like to feel power-
less. You shouldn't have to feel powerless if you wore a gun. That had been the whole point.
He set down his cup of coffee and bent over the keyboard once again: Dear Naomi Judd: I cannot tell you how shocked and grieved I was to learn of your illness, and I hope . . .
Mark Underhill twisted his goosenecked study lamp so that its light shone on the wall above Joshua's bed. The stains were still there, faint traces of pink against a surface scrubbed whiter than the rest of the wall. He supposed that he could scour the rest of the wall, or even repaint it a gleaming white, but there seemed little point in the exercise. He would always know that the stains were there, no matter what cosmetic effects were used to disguise them. Joshua had forever tainted this room with his blood and brains.
Mark slept in the other twin bed, under the window, with a red-and-blue Lone Star quilt, and a threadbare tiger saved from his infancy. The brothers had not so much shared a room as halved it. Mark's side was messy, plastered with rock-star posters and devoid of books, while Joshua's had been tidy and bare, except for his reading material, everything from All Creatures Great and Small to Playboy. Odd that he hadn't left a note, Mark thought, as hung up as he had been on words. Not that Mark would have wanted to read it. What did the immediate whys matter? It was done. It was finished. And now he and Maggie were left in twelve rooms of silence, four of them haunted with fading red 103
stains and the indelible memory of bodies sprawled in death. Thanks a lot, Josh. Where am I supposed to sleep now?
It was all right for Maggie. He hadn't even entered her room. There were no bloody footprints to scrub away, no horrors to remember every time you looked at it. But the other three upstairs bedrooms . . . Well, Mom and Dad's bedroom wasn't exactly defiled. He'd got them downstairs, but Mark couldn't bring himself to move into their sanctuary. Even when their possessions had been removed, it still smelled of them; it was still their territory. Simon's little bedroom under the eaves—he would never set foot in there again. Let Simon haunt it to his heart's content, if his soul had ever awakened from that shotgun blast. Simon had been taken away, and buried miles from the farm, but as far as Mark was concerned, the little body still lay curled up in the pine sleigh bed, its blond curls spilling over the pillow, caked in gouts of red.
That left Mark's own room, the one he had shared with Joshua, where Joshua had come with a shotgun to sit down and consider the consequences of his killing spree before taking the easy way out, abandoning them without family to an indifferent community.
Mark wondered if any of that anguish still lingered, charging the air with despair. He dreaded going upstairs to sleep, afraid that if he opened his eyes in the darkness, he would find Josh standing over him, looking down with unutterable sadness. They had made a pact
once, when he was ten and Josh was twelve. They had been hooked on horror movies at the time, and after watching a ghost story on television—had the ghost revealed the location of treasure to his living buddy?—the brothers had come to an agreement, shaking hands to seal the bargain. Whichever one of us dies first will come back to tell the other what it's like to be dead. That was the deal. It had seemed very daring and romantic back then, when neither of them really believed they were ever going to die at all. The pact had been casually made: sixty, seventy years from now, drop in, why doncha? Who knew that quiet, intense old Josh would kick open the Steppenwolf door before he even hit twenty?
Mark Underhill stared at the faint outline of the bloodstains on the bedroom wall and spoke aloud. "Look, Josh, the deal is off, okay? I know we made a pact, but I'm canceling it now. If you're here, go away, all right? I don't want to see you! I'm going to shut my eyes now, and I want you to get the hell out of here. You've done enough. If you wanted me to know what being dead was like, you sure as hell could have arranged it. Like you showed Mom and Dad and Simon. Just get the hell out of our lives!"
He buried his face in Joshua's pillow so that Maggie could not hear him sobbing.
Nora Bonesteel sat knitting in the firelight. Knitting was a skill that didn't require the use of sharp eyes, the way needlepoint does. Nora's eyes were good enough for her age—with read-105
ing glasses—but she needed a strong light to see the stitches, especially in dark cloth. Tonight she felt like sitting in shadows, letting the peacefulness of the night come over her while her thoughts wandered. She just needed something to busy her hands; her generation was not raised to be idle. Fifty years' experience had taught her to guide the yarn with her fingers, a little stiffer now with rheumatism, but still sure. The pile of crimson wool in her lap was beginning to take shape beneath the arc of her n
eedles: A little sleeve protruded from one knitted side.
The flicker of firelight through the two front windows made her house shine out like a jack-o'-lantern above the dark valley, while across the ridge the Hangman glowered in a sliver of moonlight. She didn't want to think about the holler tonight. Her gaze lingered on a pile of National Geographies stacked on the pine coffee table. She would like to have traveled. She'd done a little bit of "gallivanting" in her youth: a trip to Asheville to visit kinfolks in the forties, and once in 1956 an excursion to Myrtle Beach, chaperoning a church weekend, but the rest of her life had been spent within the shadow of the Tennessee mountains. She would like to have seen how the Alps or the Andes measure up to them. She might have got away back in 1932, when a summer of blackberry picking and dressmaking had given her enough money to go to college at East Tennessee State in Johnson City. It was the depression then, so nobody had any money, and she didn't feel too much out of
place with her country clothes and hill ways. The 1932 Buccaneer, a blue softcover yearbook of only a few dozen pages, shows a winsome girl with an oval face and black hair parted in the center and pulled back to the nape of her neck. She looks out of place among all the crimp-curled blondes, but there is a serenity to her features that almost transcends the sadness. She looks out from the page as if she knows something sorrowful about you, but she hasn't the heart to tell.
She had been studying to get her teaching certificate, but in late spring of her first year she took out her cardboard suitcase one night and starting putting all her belongings into it. The next day came word that Johnsie Bonesteel had died back in Dark Hollow. Nora was needed at home to see to her ailing mother.
She had never married. Occasionally, a teenager in calf love would ask her why, as if she'd missed out on the most marvelous experience imaginable, and she had a string of quick answers to reel off. / didn't know the last man to ask me would be the last man to ask me. My sweetheart was killed at Chickamauga. (She didn't use that one much these days. Young people had no sense of history and missed the joke.) / put the last stitch in a Lone Star quilt and doomed myself to spinsterhood. The real reasons were more complex. She was an only child who had learned early to live with solitude, and, finally, to like it. Her mother's illness kept her tied down for most of her twenties, and then she had inherited the house, so there 107
was no great need to wed just for the sake of stability. She made a little money with her needlework, her goats, and her garden crops, but on a rural farm a little money was quite enough. So the urgency was lacking.
Lacking on both sides, truth to tell. The young bucks in Wake County knew well enough about black-haired Nora Bonesteel and her knowing. Hadn't she smelled that Watson fire two days before it happened? And didn't she stop working on Flossie Johnston's wedding dress the day Jack Sherrod was killed at the Battle of the Bulge, though it was weeks before the family was notified? People didn't have anything against Nora Bonesteel: She was a good Christian woman, and she couldn't help the Sight. Some folks said the midwife had forgotten to put the salt in her mouth when she was born, and that left her susceptible to the visions, but most folks felt it was just the Bonesteel way. Her grandmother had been the same; but still and all, they didn't want to get too close to her. It would be like having Death as an upstairs boarder, somebody said. People were always afraid of what she'd know about them; and they didn't want to be reminded of it.
Nora looked up from her knitting. The fire threw long shadows against the white walls, shapes that seemed to writhe and beckon in the dimness. She stared for a few minutes in the direction of the fire shadow. "Yes," she said gently, as if continuing a conversation. "I know why you felt you had to, and it isn't my place to call you right or wrong. We're not to pass
judgment in this world. What's done is done." She hesitated for a moment in the silence, poised as if she were listening. "All the same, I'd let it go now. Go on now, just turn loose. Let the Lord work things out." Nora Bonesteel went back to her knitting.
CHAPTER 6
I am but mad north-north-west;
when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw. — Hamlet
It wasn't often that Sheriff Spencer Arrowood played taxi service for a human skull. Occasionally, it had been his grim duty to convey someone's mortal remains away in a body bag, but usually the rescue squad could be called to carry out that task. This skull, however, was so clean and anonymous, and so departmental, with the little metal hooks at its jaws, and its steel-hinged cranium, that it did not carry with it any of the ordinary pall of death. As far as the sheriff was concerned, this hunk of bones had never been mortal. Since he would never know its past or even its identity, to him it was merely a stage prop. At least it was going to be.
The student drama group at Hamelin High was doing Hamlet as its fall play, and as a favor to the drama teacher, an old friend of his mother, Spencer Arrowood had been coerced into borrowing a skull from the hospital in Unicoi County, and delivering it to the school so that "Yorick" would be present for play practice.
As he drove past the courthouse, he automatically looked at the park bench under the elms 113
to see who Vernon Woolwine was today. Rain or shine, Vernon was always there, outfitted in an ingenious costume reflecting the condition of his psyche. "A welfare-funded exercise in street theatre," one of the county commissioners had called him, but it wasn't against the law to be crazy, and so instead of being sent to an institution, he had become one. By now the citizens of Hamelin were accustomed to the sight of Batman or Elvis lounging about in front of the courthouse, and they took a perverse pride in this civic peculiarity: Jonesborough might be a quaint little tourist trap, but it had nothing to compete with Vernon.
As he came level with the park bench, Spencer slowed the patrol car and gave an affable nod to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle eating a doughnut. Vernon had scrounged up an adult-sized Halloween costume, maybe on sale in the week after the holiday, and he was perched in his usual spot, resplendent in a Styrofoam shell tunic, tight green pants, and a red kerchief, tied around his forehead. Idly, Spencer wondered which turtle he was. Maybe he'd ask at the high school; it would be a good icebreaker with the kids. Better than trying to discuss Shakespeare.
Spencer smiled, remembering his own days at Hamelin High in the mid-sixties. In his senior year the play had been Macbeth, and Spencer had strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage as the avenging thane of Fife. Martha, who was now the dispatcher at the sheriff's office, had played the waiting woman to Lady Macbeth, a cheerleader named Tyndall Johnson,
suitably robed and wimpled for the role. But Spencer found that his most endearing memory of the school play was not his own theatrics, but James Jessup's discovery of Shakespeare.
Before the students began rehearsing the Macbeth, Mrs. Oakey had assigned them parts in English class and had them read it aloud, one act each day. Though none of them realized it at the time, it was a painless audition for the major roles. Those who read with the most expression and comprehension got the biggest parts.
James Jessup, as he recalled, ended up playing the cream-faced loon in the stage production, so that he hardly said anything at all, but Spencer believed that he had got more out of the play than anyone in the community. He was a wiry towhead from a farm family from way up the mountain in Pigeon Roost. He was probably the first person in his family to even get to the senior year in high school, and while his grades weren't outstanding, he was clever enough, and he could learn anything that captured his attention.
He had never heard of the play Macbeth, but the story of a murderous Scottish warrior in league with witches took his fancy as no algebra problem or French vocabulary list had ever managed to do. Once he grasped the story and the idea of the treacherous prophecy, he became consumed with the plot and with trying to figure out how it would end. Unlike the more cultured town students, Spencer among them, James Jessup had no idea how the play was go-115
ing to turn out. Each day in
class he would listen to the cadence of the dialogue with all the alertness of an attorney following the opponent's testimony. Oddly enough, he seemed to understand the language better than the town students. Every so often, when a word in the text was questioned, it was James, not Mrs. Oakey, who supplied the definition.
"Palter," he would say. "That means fool around, don't it? My grandma used to say that every now and again."
It turned out that he was going home to Pigeon Roost every evening and telling the story of Macbeth to his family, acting out all the parts himself and giving them updates on each new development as the acts were read out in English class. The Jessups were in the same suspense as he was, waiting for the outcome. In those days before television in the hills, the Jes-sup family had spent long hours in front of the hearth, debating how the prophecy "none of woman born" would come to pass.
On the night of the play, three generations of the Jessup family turned up in their ancient Ford truck and took front-row seats, not so much for James's acting debut as to see the thane of Glamis get his comeuppance from a tree-bearing rebel army.
Now Spencer knew that satellite dishes ringed the hills above Hamelin, and that the present generation of Jessups probably watched MTV and maybe even owned a video of Orson Welles's Macbeth. He wondered if, in the process of assimilation, they had lost all their magic. That would be a shame.
Now, more than twenty years after Spencer Arrowood's acting debut, the Hamelin High play was Hamlet. The students would be familiar with the play's plot. Some of them would have seen the Mel Gibson version at the mall in Johnson City, but the trade-off was that the thread of language would have been lost. He was willing to bet that no backwoods student had heard words like bruited and boltered from Granny at home. Today's granny was a depression-era baby whose stock in trade was the Enquirer and "All My Children," not folk ballads and mountain legends.
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