Summer of the Redeemers

by Carolyn Haines

  I turned Cammie toward home and let her run.

  Arly was waxing the car under the big cedar tree. He looked up at the sound of hoofbeats, and at another time I would have been delighted to see the reluctant admiration in his eyes. I stopped by the car and leaped to the ground. “Get the keys. Those church people have Picket, and they’re going to kill her.”

  Arly stopped his rubbing motion on the hood of the car. He looked at me like I’d grown another head.

  “They’ve got Picket?” He couldn’t grasp what I’d said.

  “Arly, they caught her and tied her up. They said they’d kill her. We’ve got to go down there right now and get her back.”

  “Mama Betts!” He dropped the cloth on the car and turned to the house. “Grandma! You’d better get out here.”

  Mama Betts stopped at the screen door and then walked into the yard.

  “Bekkah says those church people have Picket. She says they’re going to kill her.”

  “They are!” I grabbed Mama Betts’ arm. “They tied her up and she was screaming. I couldn’t stop them. They had a knife. And I know they killed Caesar, Nadine’s horse. He was stabbed more than thirty times.”

  A blankness passed across Mama Betts’ eyes, just a second of complete stillness before she spoke. “I knew when Mr. Tom was killed that something evil had come on this road.” She dried her hands on her apron and started walking to the house. “Get the keys, Arly, I want you to drive us to the sheriff’s office. We could call him, but he’ll delay. If we go there, I can force him to action faster.”

  “There’s not time!” I ran after her, dragging Cammie behind me. “They’re going to kill Picket. Joe Wickham won’t do anything. Not about a dog. He’ll just think up excuses.”

  Mama Betts didn’t stop. “We can’t go down there and get her, Bekkah. We’ll get Joe Wickham. He has legal authority to go on their property. We might have to get a warrant, but we’ll get the legal power, and we’ll go get the dog.”

  “They’ll kill her!” I grabbed the bow of her apron. “We have to go down there now.”

  “What are you doing with that horse?” She didn’t turn around.

  “I took her. And I’m not taking her back.”

  “Arly! Get the wax off and let’s go. I’m getting my purse. Bekkah, unsaddle that horse and put her in Picket’s old pen. She’ll have to stay there until we can do something else.” She paused. “Better yet, ride her down to the Welfords’. Put her in his barn and be sure she has some water. She’s hollowed out. Now go! And walk her there, don’t trot her! We’ll drive by to get you.”

  By the time Grandma got Joe Wickham motivated, with all his warrants and finding his deputies and all, Picket would be dead. I had to think of something better to do.

  “Cammie’s pretty hot,” I felt her chest. “You’d better not wait for me.”

  Mama Betts walked up and put her hand on the horse’s shoulder, then her chest. “You need to walk her. Use the hose and walk her in between. Arly, let’s go.” She didn’t move as Arly opened her car door for her. “Bekkah, you stay right here in this yard with that horse. Don’t you get any idea in your head. You stay away from those church people until we get back.”

  “What if they kill Picket?”

  “If they’ll kill a dog, they might hurt you. Stay away from down there. You swear?”

  “Mama Betts, I …” My lying ability wasn’t up to her direct stare. “I’ll take care of Cammie, I swear that. I don’t have anybody to go down there with me, and I’m afraid to go alone.”

  Mama Betts nodded. “Take care of that horse. I don’t know how long this will take. Joe can be difficult, but you stay in this yard.”

  She got in the car and slammed the door as Arly was driving away. Even though he wouldn’t admit it, he loved Picket as much as I did.

  I hosed Cammie’s legs with cold water and walked her to Jamey Louise’s. I had to think of something to do. Something faster than Joe Wickham, and more powerful.

  Jamey didn’t say anything about how I’d gotten Cammie when I asked if she’d walk the horse for another fifteen minutes and let her stay in their barn for an hour or so. She got a water bucket and said she’d take care of her.

  “How’s Greg?” she finally asked. She held Cammie’s reins and the water bucket.

  “Jamey, too much has happened. The Redeemers have Picket.” To her credit she knew better than to say Picket was just a dog. She didn’t understand why I was so terribly upset, but she let it pass. I thanked her for looking after Cammie and ran back home. I’d thought of something to do. It was an act of sheer desperation, but I had to do it.

  The house was quieter than I’d ever heard it when I went to the hall and picked up the telephone receiver. The operator was very helpful in getting the number for the newspaper in Mobile. I knew Cathi was there because I’d seen her name above some stories. Mama Betts had been snorting about it.

  The operator put the call through for me, and I hung on to the black telephone like it was my lifeline.

  “Hello.”

  I recognized Cathi’s sleepy accent hidden by a gloss of living in other places.

  “Cathi, it’s Bekkah.” I drew a breath. “There’s nobody else I could call or I wouldn’t be calling you. Some people down the road from me have my dog and they’re going to kill her. They’ve been doing some terrible things. Will you help me?” I got it all out in one lung full.

  “What is it that I can do?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being mean or just asking a sincere question. “Go with me down there. Make them give me Picket back. You can do it. You aren’t afraid of them.”

  “How can I do that, Bekkah?”

  She sounded tired, like maybe she’d been up for several days, the way Effie sounded when she got to the end of a book and couldn’t stop writing to sleep.

  “They’ve been selling babies down there. They beat the children there with coat hangers, and they nearly killed one boy.”

  “You know this for a fact.” All languor was gone from her voice. She was alert.

  “I saw his back. I saw the records where it showed how much they got for the babies. Nadine wrote it all down.”

  “Wait a minute. Who’s Nadine?”

  “The horse woman, remember?”

  “Right. And she’s got it written down. And the boy that was beaten. Where is he?”

  “He’s sort of staying with Nadine.”

  “Why hasn’t Walt done something about this?”

  This was the question I knew she’d ask. “The Judge and Effie have gone to Hollywood. They’ve been out there for a while, and I didn’t want to tell him on the phone. There wasn’t anything he could do from that distance anyway.”

  “Hollywood?” Shock echoed in her voice. “What in the hell is Walt doing in Hollywood?”

  “Cathi, if you don’t come on, they’re going to kill Picket. Please! You can get here from Mobile a lot faster than Mama Betts can get the sheriff.” I wiped the tears from my face.

  “I’ll be there in thirty minutes, Bekkah. I can’t make any promises about the dog, but I’ll try.”

  Thirty minutes. Mobile wasn’t that much farther from Kali Oka Road than Jexville. Thirty minutes. Did Picket have that long to live?

  I tried not to think about what they might be doing to her. My imagination had been called gruesome, but I didn’t need much imagination when I thought about Caesar. I paced the hall, then the kitchen, and finally the yard. By the time thirty minutes was up, I was at the end of the driveway walking up and down the road.

  I’d decided that I wasn’t going to tell anyone about Nadine and Greg. If there was any way possible to get that memory out of my mind, I was going to do it. I felt like I’d lifted up a rotten board and exposed wriggling grubs and white creatures never intended to feel the sun on their slick skins.

  Nadine and Greg were breaking some kind of law. It had to do with age, and I’d heard Effie and The Judge talking about it one time before. Ol
d men weren’t supposed to do it with younger girls under the age of sixteen. Old men who did went to jail. I wasn’t certain if the same law applied to older women and young boys, but I thought that it must.

  The entire thing brought up some feelings in me that I didn’t understand and didn’t want to think about. There had been a terrible kind of beauty in Nadine’s body glistening in the sun. The idea of what she was doing to Greg made me walk faster.

  I thought about them in the barn, because as uneasy as it made me feel, it was better than thinking about Picket.

  I heard the car coming down Kali Oka, and I knew it was Cathi before I recognized the shiny red Pontiac. She stopped and I ran around to the passenger side and got in.

  “It’s at the end of the road,” I managed.

  She gunned the motor and red dust blasted out behind us. She was going too fast over the rutted road, but I didn’t try to stop her, and to my relief, she didn’t ask any questions.

  When we got to the creek, she pulled right up to the bridge and stopped.

  “Stay in the car,” she said.

  “No.” I got out even as I spoke.

  “Bekkah, let me talk to these people. Maybe they’ll give me the dog. If you go up there, they’ll lose face in front of you. You’re a kid and that won’t be easy for them.”

  I slumped against the car. “What if they’ve hurt her?”

  “Don’t borrow trouble before you have to,” she said. “Get in the car and lock the doors. I left the keys in the ignition. If anything happens, drive home. Don’t wait for me. If I’m not back in half an hour, go on back to your house. I can walk if I have to.”

  She was talking like she thought they might hurt her.

  “Remember that my editor knows where I am. Tell your grandmother that.”

  She wasn’t making a lot of sense, but I nodded.

  “We are a lot alike, Bekkah.” She turned away and started over the bridge. I got in the car as she’d told me and locked the doors.

  When she was about fifty yards on their property, one of the men came up to her. She took something out of her purse and showed him, and he went away. In a few minutes he returned with Rev. Marcus.

  I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but the preacherman was waving his hands and striding around like he was delivering the sermon on the mount. Cathi wiped her face, and I wondered if he’d spit on her. She took a notebook out of her purse and started writing.

  The preacherman made a snatch for the notebook, and she twisted it out of his grip. I could tell she was shouting at him. For a minute I thought she was going to slap him full across the face, but she got a grip on herself and didn’t.

  I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I slipped out of the car and inched toward the creek where I could hear.

  “If you don’t get that dog, I’ll have the district attorney’s office in here investigating before the sun goes down,” Cathi said. She was mad and her voice was raised. “My father and the attorney general happen to be very close friends.”

  “There’s no dog here,” Rev. Marcus replied. His voice was strained, but it was under control.

  “You’ve got two minutes. I have enough on you to keep a team of prosecutors busy for the next five years.”

  “We haven’t seen any dogs around here. We don’t allow pets. It’s a church policy. We’re a God-fearing religious organization, and there’s nothing you can do to us. Nothing. Now you’d better get off Redeemer property before I have to press charges against you.”

  “The dog or more trouble than you can manage. You have a minute and a half.”

  “We haven’t seen any dogs. The young woman you’re talking about is a liar and a troublemaker. She’s made up this entire story to torment us.”

  I ran across the bridge and stopped at Cathi’s side. “You liar. You took Picket with her legs tied.” I saw one of the men who’d helped catch her. “He did it.” I pointed at him. “Ask him about selling the babies. Ask him about the horse he killed.”

  Cathi shifted to my side, close enough so that I could smell the perfume she wore. “Go to the car, Bekkah,” she said slowly. “The reverend is going to get Picket and bring her to me right now, aren’t you, Reverend? Bekkah can identify the men who took her dog. You may be willing to spend several months in jail while the charges are being investigated, but are they?”

  The man I’d pointed at stepped forward. Rev. Marcus tried to ignore him, but he moved closer still. “It ain’t worth all of this,” he said slowly. “You said this time would be different. You said we’d be able to settle down and live. You said—”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong.” Rev. Marcus spoke to the man, but he looked at Cathi. “That girl was trespassing. You both are. If anybody has a right to call the law, it’s us.”

  “Call them.” Cathi put her hand on my shoulder. “Call them while we stand here, if you dare.”

  “Oh, I dare,” he said, his face twisting with hatred.

  Rev. Marcus pointed at the man who’d tied Picket. “Get the goddamn dog now!” He leaned forward. “You don’t know anything about me, and you’d better shut up.” He stood right in Cathi’s face. “This had better end here, or I’ll slap a lawsuit on that newspaper of yours like it’s never seen before.”

  “You’re right, this had better end here. Nothing had better happen to this girl or her dog, or anything else she loves. She told me about the threats you made. Bullying a child may excite you, Mr. Marcus, but I find it sick and disgusting. It had better stop.”

  Picket raced through the trees toward me. She was a red and gold blur, and I stepped away from Cathi and called her to me. She almost knocked me over as she tumbled against me. I grabbed her collar and held tight as I kissed her and felt all over her body.

  “Get out of here,” the preacherman snarled.

  Cathi grabbed my shoulder and pushed me toward the creek.

  “You’re going to burn in hell, bitch,” Rev. Marcus spat. “All of you. I can see you toasting in the flames. And I’m laughing.”

  “Get that dog and get in the car,” Cathi said under her breath. Her fingers were about to break my shoulder as she pushed me toward the bridge. “Stay in front of me.”

  Picket and I were almost at the bridge when I saw Magdeline. She was off to my left, hiding in the woods. If she hadn’t moved, I never would have seen her. I stopped on the bridge and Cathi slammed into my back. She was backing up, watching the preacherman and the other Redeemer men. There weren’t any women anywhere in sight.

  “Move!” she snapped at me.

  “It’s Magdeline,” I whispered. I motioned to her to come with us. In that instant she disappeared into the woods. I walked on to the car, afraid if I delayed any longer the Redeemers would see her and try to catch her. At least I knew she was still up and walking.

  Thirty-six

  CATHI wouldn’t come into the house. I fixed her a glass of iced tea with lemon, and she drank it sitting in the swing. She knew Effie wouldn’t want her in her house, and there wasn’t any point making a big issue out of it. When she finished her tea, she got out her notebook and started asking me questions.

  Selling babies was what she asked about first, then the beatings Greg had gotten, then Caesar and finally Nadine and how she might be Rev. Marcus’s ex-wife. She wanted me to take her down to Nadine’s, but I still had to figure out a way to keep Cammie, and I wanted to wait for Mama Betts to come back with Joe Wickham.

  I was going to be in big trouble, but as I lay in the grass with Picket, I didn’t care. Her legs were real sore, and she whined whenever I touched them and rubbed them, but she wasn’t bleeding. Her muzzle was cut where they’d put a wire or something around it to keep her mouth shut, but I found some roast beef in the refrigerator and she ate that in two gulps.

  “Bekkah?”

  “What?” I got up on an elbow so I could look at Cathi. She looked worried.

  “Will you give me Walt’s number in California? I want to call him. He should know abou
t this. Some of the things you’ve told me are … extremely serious.”

  My fingers curled in Picket’s ruff. “I can’t. It would hurt Effie too much if you called out there. That would be bad enough, but if she found out I’d given you the number, she wouldn’t give me a chance to explain.” Cathi tried not to show her disappointment, but it was there. “What I will do is call The Judge myself, and I’ll tell him how you helped me.”

  “You should tell him everything you’ve told me. I can’t believe this has been going on here and nobody but a thirteen-year-old girl knows.”

  “Nadine knows.”

  “Yes, and that’s another matter. We need to go down there.”

  I explained to her about stealing the horse, an issue that didn’t seem as serious to her as it seemed to me. Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen what I’d seen in the loft.

  “Maybe we should take the horse back,” Cathi suggested.

  I shook my head. “She’s not going back. Nadine isn’t taking care of her right.”

  “You said Nadine knew everything about horses. If I remember, she was the best thing since sliced bread.”

  “She’s punishing me with Cammie. She got mad at me about something, so she threw me off her place.”

  “All summer long I’ve thought of Kali Oka Road as this long stretch of red dust where the most exciting thing that happens is when two cars have to figure out how to pass each other. You’ve been thrown off two places in a matter of weeks. You’ve got wild religious cults who sell babies and beat children to a bloody pulp, horse theft, animal abuse and murder. If you had a little deviant sex going on here, it would be a complete Faulkner novel.”