by Ninie Hammon
“He’s too short to be a cannon,” Carter replied and made no attempt to keep the contempt out of his voice. “More the size of a pop gun. But he’s a mean, nasty, vindictive little weasel. He yelled at me that when he figured out which one of the McCulloughs did the shooting, he’d find the man and kill him.”
“Would he go through with a threat like that?”
“Absolutely.”
*
After Carter Addington left, Warren told Stella to reschedule his 9:30 appointment and hold his calls. He swiveled his chair around to the big window behind his desk and stared sightlessly at the Kanawha River and the mountains rising up behind it as he carefully examined the fabric of his grand design to make sure there were no holes in it, no frayed edges or loose threads.
The plan was solid. It had been a good one before Carter Addington walked into Warren’s office this morning. Now, it was a great one. Now, Warren had a scapegoat. Somebody to blame. A focus for all the anger the disaster he planned to inflict on Sadler Hollow would generate. The Campbell clan.
Somebody took a potshot at poor Jake or Zach or Zeke—whatever his name was—Campbell in the woods and now the Campbells were out for blood. When a dam blows up that will flood out a whole hollow full of McCulloughs, which way will accusing fingers point?
He actually chuckled aloud at his good fortune. He couldn’t have designed a better set of circumstances than a clan feud to take the fall for his handiwork. And it would be his handiwork. He intended to blow a hole in Impoundment Dam No. 2 all by himself. Warren had spent enough time in the mines to know his way around a stick of dynamite. Get someone else to do the dirty work, and the decision would come back to bite you in the backside somewhere down the line. No, he’d do what had to be done with his own hands. Sometime soon, while the feud was still hot and emotions were running high. Sometime when no one would be around. A weekend.
This weekend.
A huge smile pulled back the corners of Warren thick lips, revealing the chewed-up end of the unlit cigar clenched between his teeth.
***
Jesse McCullough sat in the rocking chair on his front porch, his ball cap pulled down over his eyes, his feet resting on the porch railing, sound asleep.
All of a sudden, the chair tilted sideways, and he slid out of it in a heap on the floor. He came up sputtering and cussing until he saw who’d shoved the chair over.
“What. Happened?” Carter ground the words out one at a time through clenched teeth. Jesse was so surprised and rattled he forgot all the responses he’d cooked up in his head and spit out the truth.
“Swear to God, Carter, we didn’t mean to hurt—”
“We?” Carter roared. “Who’s we?”
Jesse got to his knees, then stood. He wanted to rip his own tongue out by the roots. He’d never meant to tell Carter about Buster. What was the point of using the boy so Carter wouldn’t know Jesse’d got the shakes if he couldn’t keep his own mouth shut about it?
“I won’t ask again, Jesse,” Carter spoke the words softly, but there was more venom in them than in a bushel basket full of rattlers.
“Me and Buster.”
“You took a sixteen-year-old kid out to watch you shoot Zeke Campbell!”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what exactly?”
“He didn’t watch.” Jesse saw Carter’s hands ball into fists. “I mean, he didn’t go to watch me, he went to…I didn’t shoot Zeke, Carter. Buster did.”
The look of shock on Carter’s face would have been comical if there’d been anything about this whole situation that was funny. His eyes got huge and then it was like all the air whizzed out of him, a balloon with the end untied. He sagged back against the railing, maybe to keep from falling if his knees buckled.
“You’re telling me…?”
“I couldn’t. I didn’t want to say. I’m…it’s embarrassing, but I got me the shakes.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This!” Jesse said and thrust his hands out in front of Carter’s face. For a moment they were still, then his right hand began to tremble. A couple of seconds later, the left followed.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I ain’t got no idea.” Jesse righted the rocker and sat down in it. “Started about a year ago and’s been getting worse ever since. If I’m doing something, moving my hands, I’m fine. But if I have to hold ’em still…”
“I’ve never seen your hands shake. If I had, I sure wouldn’t have—”
“I keep my hands in my pockets a lot. Ain’t nobody noticed ’em shake. Well, ’cept Angie Faye, and she’s all over me to go have it seen about. But it don’t hurt nothing and—”
“Why’d you tell me you’d shoot Zeke when you knew you couldn’t? What possessed you to take a sixteen-year-old boy?” It was like there was so much for Carter to get his mind around that he didn’t know where to start. Which was good. Maybe this wasn’t gonna go as bad for Jesse as he’d been scared it would. “What happened out there, Jesse? You were just supposed to wound him!”
“It’s true then, what I heard? That he’s paralyzed?” Carter only looked at him. “Cuz, I’m jest glad he ain’t dead! He tripped! Buster had took a bead on his leg. I figured that was the safest place to shoot him, less likely to miss and hit something…but then Zeke stumbled, kinda went down on one knee just as Buster pulled the trigger.”
“Did he see you?”
Jesse wasn’t about to admit that he wasn’t a hundred percent sure what Zeke did or didn’t see because he was fifty yards away when Buster pulled the trigger!
“He couldn’t have. Back was to Buster. To us. And when Buster fired, Zeke fell forward. Never turned around.” That’s what Buster’d told him when he finally got the kid calmed down enough to think clear. “’Sides, we ambushed him from that overhang about half of a mile from the road. Waited till he was going back out so’s Riley’d get worried when he didn’t show up and go looking for him. Didn’t want him to lay there for a couple of hours and bleed to death.”
Jesse waited for Carter to acknowledge that it was smart of him to think of that, but that was probably too much to ask, the frame of mind his cousin was in.
“Anybody see you going in there, or—?”
“Didn’t nobody see us doin’ nothing! I was careful. But even if somebody hada seen, you think they’d tell?”
“An eighteen-year-old boy’s never going to walk again for the rest of his life,” Carter growled. “Yeah, for that, I think even a McCullough might tell.”
“Ain’t nothing for anybody to tell.”
“What about Buster? Is he going to go out and brag to his friends how he—?”
“He’s so scared he spent all last night and most of today in the outhouse! First he was pukin’, then he was…told Angie Faye he ate somethin’ gamey.”
Carter was quiet. Thinking. Jesse could tell he was so upset there was a whole lot he wasn’t sayin’, but that was fine with Jesse. He didn’t enjoy getting yelled at. Finally, Carter let out a breath.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Where’s the mud from Blood Creek?”
Jesse hopped up out of his rocker and down the stairs to his truck, pulled out the mason jar and handed it to Carter. He took it without sayin’ nothing, turned and started back to his car. Then he stopped and turned back around.
“You do understand how bad this is, don’t you, Jesse?”
“I’m sorry it turned out this way, Carter. We wuz only tryin’ to do what you told us to do.”
“Yeah,” he said and turned back around and headed toward his car. Jesse heard him muttering under his breath, “What I told you to do.”
***
“Buster?” Carter said aloud in an awed whisper as he drove down Northfield Road.
The idiot kid would tell. Only a matter of time. Not right now, but in a week or a month or a year. Jesse was loyal, stupid but dependable, safe. But Buster? Buster’d get drunk and brag to his friends. Or strut it out
in front of his girlfriend to show what a big man he was. The boy was even dumber than his father. He was incapable of carrying a secret like that to his grave.
Eventually, whoever Buster told would tell somebody else, and the genie would be out of the bottle. And when it hit the fan, Buster—and maybe even Jesse, too, to save his kid’s hide—would fall all over himself to point the finger at Carter.
Yep, it was only a matter of time.
Carter swerved to the side of the road, opened his car door and lost his lunch. When the reflexive heaving finally subsided, he closed the door and leaned his forehead on his hands on the steering wheel, panting. He’d wanted to give Piper’s cocky little brother a flesh wound that’d heal in a few weeks and barely leave a scar. It’d all seemed so simple.
Now what?
He looked down and saw that his hands were shaking worse than Jesse’s.
He took a deep breath, let it out slow and settled back in the seat.
The mason jar of red mud was in the floorboard, the mud he’d planned to use to convince Piper that Grayson had lost it and…
He stopped breathing. That was it, of course, his way out.
Carter’d never given a moment’s thought to the criminal consequences of shooting Zeke. He knew the Campbells wouldn’t go crying to the sheriff over a flesh wound. But it was different now. The law was involved. The sheriff had been called to the health department clinic in Chandler as soon as the nurse on duty saw it was a bullet wound. The Philippi Detachment of the West Virginia State Police was investigating, too. If Carter managed to lay the blame on Grayson—and everybody bought the story—it wouldn’t matter what some stupid teenager bragged to his drunk friends someday. Nobody’d believe Buster, because the “real” shooter would be…
Where?
In prison.
Grayson would go to prison. And Piper would be Carter’s.
Carter sat very still as realization settled over him. He’d never intended to do anything but take his brother’s wife—not because he had anything against Grayson but because he loved Piper. He couldn’t help it; she was the only woman he’d ever loved, no matter how hard he’d tried to forget her. She cared about him, too. She did. Only a little while longer, another month or two. If Grayson hadn’t shown up early, Carter could have won her heart. None of this would have been necessary if Grayson…
Could he send his own brother to prison?
He sat there by the side of the road for a long time. The shadows thickened. Finally, he stirred, started the car and drove slowly down the road. It wasn’t like he had made some kind of decision. It was simply that he accepted the nature of reality. Forces had been set in motion he couldn’t control anymore. People had been hurt; more people were going to be hurt. He hadn’t planned it that way, but sometimes things didn’t work out like you planned. And the truth was his conscience was encrusted with worse transgressions than this.
He pulled up in front of his mother’s house and killed the engine, wondering idly if Piper’d told Grayson he was coming. And staying. It wouldn’t be hard to do what he had to do. Grayson’s hunting gear, boots, pants and hat would be in the shed. That’s where Ma had always demanded such things be kept to keep her house full of men from tracking up her clean floors. As soon as everyone was asleep, Carter would slip out to his car, get the jar of mud and rub it deep into the tread of the soles on Grayson’s boots, maybe smear some on one knee of his pants, like he’d knelt down in the mud when he was taking aim. The only possible explanation for red mud on Grayson’s boots was that he had tracked it home from Blood Creek the day before.
Once Piper saw it, the fireworks would begin.
* * *
Zeke’s big hand felt so cold. Piper held it between both her hands, tried to warm his whole body by sheer force of will. She couldn’t. She couldn’t make him walk again by sheer force of will, either.
Dr. Bledsoe had warned that when Zeke learned his paralysis was permanent, he would go through all the stages of grief—denial, bargaining, anger and finally, acceptance. He said there was no way to tell how long it would take the boy to complete the journey.
Right now, he didn’t seem to be in any of those stages. Well, maybe denial, but it was more like stunned disbelief.
“I’s whistling the tune to the Andy Griffith Show,” he said. His voice was so weak it made her heart ache. “Seen it on a television in the window of Sears once in Charleston, and the show starts with some fella whistling. That’s what I was doin’, walking along whistling, kinda stumbled—and it wasn’t even a second later, not even a second—I opened my eyes and I was here. And I wasn’t whistling no more.”
Piper didn’t know what to say so she said nothing, just patted his hand.
“It’s funny what that little girl said, not even a week ago.”
“What little girl?”
“The one looks like a Raggedy Ann doll. Maggie. I been thinking about it ever since I woke up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The night I come over and Carter was there, you remember she walked me out to my car.”
Piper nodded. She remembered that she’d thought at the time it was an odd thing for Maggie to do.
“She was chattering away about Nellie, about how good I played. She asked if I loved my banjo, and I said I sure did. Then she said, ‘Would Nellie be enough? If all you could do was play Nellie, could you be happy?’”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said if I’s on a boat in the middle of the ocean and all I had was Nellie, I’d be happy all right—’cause I’d use her for a paddle!”
“You do still have Nellie,” Piper said softly.
“Yeah, I got me a banjo. Gonna be hard to play her, though, if’n I can’t tap my foot to the rhythm.”
He turned his face toward the wall and said nothing more.
Chapter 24
Grayson came in from checking the oil in the Rambler—it was about a quart low—and paused in the doorway. Carter was on the floor, playing with Sadie. He pulled her tattered pink blankie over his head, then yanked it off and cried “peek-a-boo.”
Sadie squealed with laughter, then snatched the blanket and draped it more or less over her head.
“Where’s Sunshine?” Carter asked. “Where did she go? I can’t find her any—”
Sadie could stand it no longer and pulled away the blanket.
“Sabie right here. Peek-a-boo.” Then she begged him, “Again, again, Unka Cardur!” and the sequence started all over.
His daughter had finally warmed up to Grayson night before last for the first time since he got home. After Piper raced out of the house for her second trip into Charleston, he’d helped his mother to bed early. The old woman was fading so fast she looked like a flower in that fast-frame Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” show he and Piper had watched on the thirteen-inch black-and-white television they had in Spindle Rock. The picture on the TV relentlessly rolled and was only visible through the snow when you correctly positioned the aluminum foil dangling between the rabbit ears of the antenna. But they had sat spellbound before it as the whole life of a flower played out in thirty seconds. A bud, full bloom, and then it withered and turned brown. Ma was withering. He had the sense that her very breaths could now be counted in a finite number.
With Ma in bed, he’d set about winning Sadie’s affections using the method that had been working successfully so far. He ignored her. He plopped down on the floor in front of the couch and began to read an old newspaper he’d found lining the bottom of the potato bin in the kitchen, where his mother had once stashed Piper to hide her presence from uninvited McCullough guests. The date on the newspaper was July 7.
When he’d explained his plan to Maggie, she had flashed a radiant smile that crinkled up the freckles on her nose. And it felt somehow like he was seeing the child for the first time, surprised that he hadn’t noticed how adorable she was. The little girl really did look like a Raggedy Ann doll, with long re
d braids tied in blue yarn and coveralls rolled up above her bare feet.
“Sadie’s curious as a little yellow kitten,” Maggie said. “You be an itch, and she’ll have to scratch it.”
Then Maggie busied herself in the kitchen noisily rewashing the already washed dishes.
Sadie was accustomed to playing happily near him. The longer he sat, the closer she nudged toward him, Finally, she brushed her long hair out her eyes with that endearing gesture, using the palms of both hands.
“Sabie can wink,” she said. “Mabie teached me.” She squeezed both eyes shut tight, crinkling her whole face, then instantly popped them back open again. “See!”
Grayson choked back a laugh.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a finer wink.”
Sadie’s dimpled smile melted him, but though he badly wanted to reach out to the precious little munchkin in front of him, he picked up the newspaper and continued reading. Sadie went back to her kitchen set, and he thought he’d lost her. But she came right back and held out a toy plate.
“Wanna doughnut? I maked it on the stove.”
The plate was empty, so he picked up the pretend doughnut and pretend munched on it, then patted his belly.
“Mmmm. That was good.”
“Wan’ anuther bite? It be’s yummy in your tummy.”
“Sure.” He took another bite. And so it went.
Half an hour later, she was sitting happily in his lap as he read to her from one of her favorite storybooks about a baby bird who fell out of the nest and went looking for his mother. Every time he’d wail pitifully, “Are you my mother?” Sadie would burst into a peal of dimpled giggles.
He gave Sadie a bath. She splashed water all over the bathroom, and somehow Grayson managed not to think about another little girl who loved to splash water, too. Then he carefully brushed the silky, honey-colored curls that reached past her waist and rocked her to sleep.
Maggie stayed quietly in the background but was waiting outside Sadie’s bedroom when he tiptoed out and closed the door softly.