Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  Inside was a letter and another envelope. The second envelope was labeled with only my first name, Earl. I put it aside and looked at the letter.

  Mr. Marcus,

  My name is Mary Hawkins. My grandmother is Ms. Arnette Lacey. Like me, I believe you know her best as Granny. She still speaks of you fondly, and I feel like I know you because she’s told me so many stories. The good news is that Granny is still very much the woman you will remember from your years living in her home. Her mind is still sharp. The bad news is her body is not doing well. She has pancreatic cancer, and the doctors are not giving her long. She would like to see you again before she goes. Please consider coming down for a few days at least. I hope you don’t mind that I looked you up in order to find your address (I’m a sheriff’s deputy here in Coulee County). I know you are probably busy with your own cases in NC, but it would mean the world to her if she got to see you again.

  I should also mention the other letter I have enclosed. According to Granny, this was delivered to her by a man she did not know a few weeks before she got sick (this would have been around April). The man asked if she could make sure you got it. Okay—just a warning—this is where it gets a little weird. Granny said she had a bad feeling about the man. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted you to get the letter. I think her exact words were, “He finally escaped, and I think somebody’s trying to pull him back in.”

  After she got the diagnosis, she decided it wasn’t hers to keep from you. So she asked me to include it. I have no idea what’s inside or who it’s from.

  What I do know is Granny grows worse every day, and your time is running out if you’d like to see her again. Please call me if you can come.

  Mary Hawkins

  470-488-4842

  I drank some more of the whiskey. I’d known this day was coming and was pleased Granny wanted me to be there. I would book a flight to Atlanta tomorrow. The mayor’s office could wait.

  I regarded the second envelope, the tight blue script on the front. Earl.

  Somehow I understood what I’d find inside was also a long time coming, that it would change me—or attempt to. I understood reading it could change my mind about going home. Even if it meant not getting to see Granny, the woman who had taken me in when I was learning to be a man and held my hand until I’d had the strength to grow up.

  Briefly, I considered throwing the envelope away unopened. I could still go visit Granny, and if she asked what was inside, I could make something up. I could tell her it was from my brother, Lester, about my father’s estate. Easy enough.

  But she wouldn’t believe me.

  And worse, I wouldn’t ever know.

  Because it might be from Lester, and if it came from Lester, it meant there was a chance—however small—that he’d forgiven me.

  Pushing the unopened envelope away, I downed the rest of the whiskey and poured another glass. I took out my cell phone and dialed Mary Hawkins’s number. I looked out the kitchen window at the parking lot as I waited for her to answer. This was nothing like the place I had grown up. I’d spent most of my formative years having never even seen a parking lot, much less an apartment building. We lived in the mountains, where the roads were dusty and the sky seemed close enough to touch, so close that when it stormed and Daddy pointed at the lightning, saying it was the “crooked finger” of heaven, I believed heaven might be just at the top of the mountain, and one day I’d climb it and see God for myself.

  * * *

  Mary Hawkins didn’t ask about the other envelope, and I didn’t ask her how an African American girl had ended up working for the traditionally lily-white Coulee County Sheriff’s Office. Granny had been the only person of color I remembered in the mountains, and she’d lived as a pariah, begrudgingly accepted because of her skill as a midwife.

  I told Mary I’d try to be there by tomorrow evening. She said that was fine and that she would tell Granny right away.

  When I ended the call with Mary Hawkins, I was still left with the other envelope. It had not vanished, as I’d hoped. It would not vanish. In a lot of ways, I realized, that envelope was like my past. I could put it aside, ignore it, drink enough to forget it, even throw it away, but that didn’t mean it was gone, that it wouldn’t still be waiting for me when I finally couldn’t run anymore.

  I picked up the envelope and tore it open.

  3

  Inside the envelope was a photo of my father.

  My dead father.

  He was standing in front of a stack of giant rocks somewhere up in the mountains. A vine-covered rock outcrop partially blocked the blue sky behind him. In the left-hand corner of the photo, the sun was smashed into a flat yellow flare. Daddy was smiling and looking right at the camera. He was thin and pale, but he was alive. On the back of the photo was a note scribbled in the same tight script that was on the front of the envelope.

  Look at the time stamp. Compare with date of death. Proof he’s alive. Need help finding him again. Please come.

  Bryant McCauley

  I looked at the time stamp. March of this year. Daddy died at the end of February. He went missing a few weeks earlier, and after a two-week manhunt, his body was found near the top of Pointer Mountain, where I’d grown up. The crows had gotten at him, and most of his face was gone, but he’d been carrying the Bible he took with him everywhere, and several people, including my brother, identified him. And now this. A photo of him—face intact, alive—nearly a month later. I laughed.

  The photograph could have very easily been faked. After all, it was from Bryant McCauley, a man who looked up to my father as more than just a preacher. Hell, McCauley looked at Daddy as more than human. He’d been one of the first to believe in my father’s “words of prophecy” and in my opinion was nearly as responsible for the radical turn the Holy Flame took in my teen years as anyone else, including my father. A charismatic leader always has to have that first follower everyone else can look to as an example. That was Bryant McCauley. He was the kind of man who would follow another man right off a cliff and then chastise everyone else for being too foolish to come along.

  So yeah, I could totally see this as a fake, as McCauley’s demented and desperate way to keep my father alive. Except . . .

  I looked at the photo again, leaning in to study the rocks behind my father, the vivid blue of the sky, the overall clarity of the photo. I had some experience with verifying photos, and my initial impression of this one made me think it was legit.

  Which scared me a little.

  I looked closer. There was no way to tell for sure unless I took it to a lab.

  Don’t even think about it, Earl. Just get rid of it and forget all about it. Make the smart choice.

  And maybe I would have followed my own advice if not for the dream.

  Ever since the cottonmouth bit me, my dreams had changed. Sometimes they were just more intense, more foreboding. Other times certain dreams would not leave me alone, repeating over and over again, night after night, until I could see them in my waking hours. These were the ones that worried me the most, because more than one of them had come true, at least partially.

  The dream I’d been having lately wasn’t specifically about my father. It was more about an old well. He was always in it, standing beside the old well atop a rainswept mountain. I watched as he turned the hand crank attached to a rope and raised the shaky dipping bucket. I could hear it clanging against the sides of beveled stone. I knew inside that bucket was something I did not want to see, something so abominable that I’d never be able to live with the memory. Yet in the dream, I was transfixed, unable to move away or close my eyes. And then, just before the bucket broke the lip of the stone well, there was a flash of light, so bright I still felt dazed upon waking. That was all, the dream in its entirety, and I’d only had it five or six times in all the years since the snake bit me. Then the news of my father’s death a few months ago reached me, and the dream came back with a vengeance. Every night, the bucket was a little closer
to reaching the top. Every night, I felt sure I’d see what was inside, but thus far, the dream had always ended just before I could catch a glimpse. I remained haunted by the imagery, by the bucket, whose contents I never saw.

  And that image of my father, hauling the unseen up from the depths of the well, was the first thing I thought of when I saw that photo.

  I pushed it away and closed my eyes, trying to clear my mind. I wanted to be rational. The dream had nothing do with the photo McCauley had sent. It was just a dream, and this was just a doctored photograph.

  In my childhood, Daddy had taken Lester and me on long excursions high in the mountains. His goal on these trips was to teach us about the area, to show us how to live in the wilderness, but mostly he wanted to use the time to talk to us about heaven and hell.

  Well, mostly hell.

  I remember a lot from these trips—a swinging bridge thrown across a deep gorge my father called Backslide Gap, a bald mountaintop surrounded by pine trees that made me feel like I was inside a great wooden fence, and a dark spot in the shadow of two mountains that Daddy said never received direct sunlight. He used each place as a metaphor for faith or, more often, the lack thereof.

  I would have remembered the well, which made it clear to me it was just a dream and nothing more.

  I looked at the photo again. And the place in the photo: I would have remembered it too. It was a bald spot—not a tree in sight—and the rocks behind Daddy opened up at the base, a tiny split that looked like a tunnel leading into a dark place.

  I decided I owed it to myself to find McCauley and see what was happening. I was going, after all; what would it hurt to track down McCauley and tell him to leave me the hell alone?

  Sighing loudly, I turned the photograph over. It would be nothing. Just a crazy man still clinging to the past.

  That was all.

  The only problem was I wasn’t completely sure who the crazy man was, me or Bryant McCauley.

  4

  When I’d last seen Coulee County, nearly thirty years ago, it was one of the smallest counties, both in actual size and population, in Georgia. As I entered it again, very little seemed to have changed. The egg-shaped county was still neatly divided by the eastern edge of the Appalachians. West of the mountains lay the civilized part, better known as the townships of Riley, Cummings, and Brethren. The side with the mountains, where I grew up, was basically a dusting of tiny communities tossed without much rhyme or reason throughout the peaks and valleys of what the locals called the Fingers. There were five mountains in Coulee County, and each mountain was identified as a different finger. I came up on Pointer Mountain, also known as Ghost Creek Mountain because of the long creek that ran along its southern face. At the time, Pointer was home to half a dozen homes and a single trailer park at the foot of the mountain. An outsider would be forgiven for assuming Thumb Mountain and Birdie Mountain were on either side of us, but the Fingers didn’t follow the normal human anatomy. Instead, to the south was Small Mountain, which best as I could tell was supposed to be the pinkie finger. North of us was Ring Mountain, so named because of the bald ring near its peak. Beyond that were Possible Mountain (some folks said it was supposed to be “Opposable,” as in opposable thumb, but through the years, it had been bastardized into “posable” and finally “possible”) and Long Finger Mountain. Long Finger was the only mountain of the five that actually contained something resembling a finger, but you had to be in just the right place to see it. Daddy had showed it to me and Lester once when he took us on a ride up Possible Mountain and gestured across the valley through the early morning mist to a stream that glistened like a silver scar.

  “That there,” he said in his low, hypnotic voice, “is where God touched these mountains with his own finger.”

  Lester and I were silent, but I remember imagining a giant finger coming down from the sky and touching the mountainside, leaving the stream of silver water like a never-ending fount of tears. I could still see it just like it was yesterday.

  I purposefully drove past Pointer and my childhood home and instead headed straight for Ring Mountain, where I’d spent the last three years of my time in North Georgia. Ring Mountain and Possible Mountain were the least settled mountains of the five. Thirty years ago, most parts of Ring were only accessible by foot, something I desperately hoped had changed. Fifty was too old to be climbing mountains, even if I did run a couple of times a week and work out with weights when I couldn’t sleep at night.

  I started up the old logging road, dropping the truck into second gear as the ground rose sharply beneath my wheels. It was midsummer and hot, but as I gained altitude, I cut the windows down and let the cooler air come in. Immediately I was struck by the smell of honeysuckle and blackberry and something earthier that might have been the soil itself. I was home, and the realization hit me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. The smell and the feel of that breeze on my face. God, I felt old and young all at once, and the tension of the last thirty years caught fire inside me. I pulled over to the side of the road and sat there, inhaling every last drop of the mountain air, gazing up at the treetops, the blue sky beyond the network of branches, and I barely noticed when the tears began.

  There were so many emotions, but perhaps the greatest was simply realizing how much I’d loved this place and how, under different circumstances, I might still be here. Would I have become a preacher like Lester if I’d stayed? The thought of such a life filled me with a deep melancholy—no matter what I did, what choice I made, I would still be left forlorn and unhappy, I thought, simply because I’d been born in these mountains, to a man whose very existence had become the stuff of myth and legend.

  I thought of the photo again, of McCauley’s short note. Need help finding him again.

  “Asking the wrong man,” I said aloud. “I lost him a long, long time ago.”

  After a few more moments, I pulled back onto the road and continued on to Granny’s house.

  * * *

  Years ago, there had been no way to reach her house except for on foot. The logging road they’d used to bring the materials to her home in the 1940s had eroded right off the side of the mountain by the time I was born in 1965, and since it was just an old black woman living alone, no one bothered to add another one. It suited Granny fine, though. She walked everywhere and often claimed it was the walking that kept her in such good shape. It was definitely something. When I’d moved in with her in 1983, she was seventy-four years old but looked closer to forty-five. Men twenty years younger than her often visited in the night, though she always played innocent if I asked about any of them, using the same line she always used: “We’re just friends. Sometimes friends need to spend the night.”

  She would be over a hundred now, but I wasn’t surprised at her longevity. She’d always lived like a much younger woman. Over the three years I’d lived with her, she revealed that she’d had two children—a boy and a girl—and they’d both been born when she was in her late forties. The boy had moved to Atlanta, and he’d often come up and visit with her on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes he’d bring his young wife, a beautiful white woman with red hair and an easy manner, and their daughter, a cutie I remembered playing peekaboo with on more than one occasion. I felt sure this was Mary Hawkins, the woman who’d sent me the letter. She’d be around thirty-five or so now. Still a youngster, but at least old enough to have worked a few years as an officer somewhere else before making the transition to Coulee County.

  I was pleased to see in the nearly thirty years I’d been away, someone had built a road that ran nearly to Granny’s front door. It was a dirt road, and there’d been some rain of late, so the rental would need a good scrubbing before I went back to the airport the next day, but it sure beat walking the last three miles.

  Her house was unchanged. Still a little log cabin, situated in the perfect shade of two of the largest live oaks I’d ever seen. When I left, Granny hadn’t had running water or power, and I didn’t see any evidence she’d upgrad
ed. In fact, the only thing preventing it from being 1983 all over again was the Chevy Tahoe parked out front. It read “Coulee County Sheriff” on the side, and I was pretty sure it belonged to Mary Hawkins.

  I parked beside it and checked myself in the mirror before getting out. This was something I rarely did in North Carolina. Hell, I couldn’t give two shits how I looked. It had never been my way, something that used to drive both Daddy and Lester—who believed in always looking your best—crazy. But this time it felt . . . almost necessary. I had to take stock of how I’d changed in thirty years. It was an urge—no, an obligation—I couldn’t explain.

  It wasn’t exactly a pretty picture. My attitude about my beard was essentially the same as my attitude about my clothes. I let it be. I saw now that it was a scraggly gray mess. My skin was darker, marked with sunspots from years out in the sun without the first thought of sunscreen. My eyes were narrow—probably too narrow—and I tried to widen them, to look more alert, but it made my head hurt, so I just let them be. I’d suffered plenty of injuries over the last thirty years working first as a bouncer at a nightclub before becoming a full-time private investigator, but all the significant ones were below the neck. I only had one scar on my face, and it was not new. Just above the beard on my right cheek, my skin puckered into a tiny pink knob, and if I looked hard enough, I could almost see where the two fangs had broken the skin and injected the venom that had knocked me on my back for five days. Thinking of the cottonmouth again made me think of Daddy. I’d promised myself on the flight down that I’d see Granny tonight and track down McCauley tomorrow. I’d meet with McCauley and tell him I wasn’t interested in hearing any more about my dead father and suggest he get some psychiatric help. After that, I’d head back to North Carolina with a simple resolution: never come back.