Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  “Not yet.”

  “Good. She needs her sleep.” She sat up. “I’ll take the dog with me today. Drop him off with a friend of mine who’ll make sure he gets treatment and a good home.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “So you heading back today?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Well, if you get any more letters, you know where to find me.”

  I scratched my head. “Sure do.”

  She stood up. “I’ve got to get moving. Actually, if I gave you the address, would you be able to take the dog to my friend? I’d love to have time to go by my apartment and take a hot shower.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “And you can wait for Leigh Ann, right? She’ll be here at nine.”

  “I don’t see why not. My flight doesn’t leave until four. I figured I’d head back to Atlanta around noon since McCauley is MIA.”

  I watched as Mary turned away to adjust her shoulder holster. She unbuttoned her shirt and reached in with one hand. She rebuttoned it and turned back to me, running a hand through her frizzy hair.

  “Don’t you want to see anyone else while you’re here? I mean, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but haven’t you kept up with anyone else over the years?”

  “Not really. I have a cousin, Burt. He came to see me in Carolina a few years back. Brought the family. Maybe I should drop by and see him.” I said it almost as much to myself as I did to Mary.

  “Granny said your brother was the preacher at the Holy Flame,” Mary said. “I met him once.”

  “Oh, yeah? What was the occasion?”

  “We were investigating a runaway. Actually a pair of them. Both girls and their families attended the Holy Flame. Lester wasn’t what I expected.” She slipped into her shoes, a sensible pair of flat sandals. “Of course, neither are you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, I kind of pictured you different. You’re not as old as I thought you’d be. And after meeting Lester, I thought you’d be . . . just different.”

  “Well, I am a very different man than my brother. We’ve had different paths in life.”

  “I suppose.” She seemed to think for a moment. “It’s none of my business, but since we’ve just spent the night together—sort of—I’m going to ask, what’s the deal with you and your brother? Granny mentioned there was some big rift.”

  “Big rift? Nah, we just haven’t spoken for thirty years. We’re fine.”

  “I’m being serious.”

  I shrugged. “So was I. Look, I’ve already said it—we’re different people. End of story.”

  “Fine,” she said and held out her hand. “It was nice meeting you, Earl Marcus. I would have loved to get to know you better.”

  I took her hand. “Same to you.”

  * * *

  Leigh Ann was late, but it didn’t take me too long to understand this wasn’t unusual. Leigh Ann was a hot mess. She wore a tight, flowery dress that accented her rather large hips and breasts. She made smoochie faces to the dog, who was just starting to wake up. When I introduced myself, she embraced me so hard, I though one of her breasts would pop loose.

  “I’ve heard sooo much about you, Earl. What are you going to name this precious dog? Now tell me about yourself. Granny said you were some kind of detective. Where was it, North Carolina? Big city, I guess?”

  She might have gone on, but I told her I had to get moving. I scooped the dog up as she hurried to get the door for me.

  “Well, don’t be a stranger,” she said. “Come back soon so we can get acquainted.”

  I smiled and promised her I would.

  At the time, I thought it was just a polite lie.

  * * *

  I’ve always heard if you don’t want to keep a stray dog, you shouldn’t name it. That was why I knew I was in trouble when the name hit me halfway down the mountain.

  “Mongoose,” I said. “Who fought the rattlesnake and lived to see another day.”

  He looked up at me and wagged his tail.

  “Goose,” I said. “I like it.”

  Goose tried to sit up, but I reached over and petted his head until he lay back down. “Just relax, buddy. Relax.” He seemed to understand, because he closed his eyes for the rest of the drive.

  Fifteen minutes later, I arrived at a nice brick home nestled along a hidden ridge. A woman was working in the yard. She looked to be in her midsixties. She waved when she saw me.

  “You’re Mary’s friend,” she said. “She said you wanted me to find a home for a dog?”

  “Maybe not. Could you just see about his injury? Hang on to him for a couple of hours? I’ll be in touch.”

  “So you want to keep the dog?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Yeah. His name is Goose.”

  “Goose?”

  “What? You don’t like it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Just take care of him for me.”

  “Sure thing.”

  I opened the passenger side of my truck and was surprised when Goose jumped out and walked on unsteady feet over to a tree and lifted his leg.

  “He looks like he’s got German shepherd in him,” she said. “And I don’t even know what else.”

  “I was thinking mastiff.”

  “Maybe. He’s going to be big for sure.”

  “Hell, he already is.” I tried to hand her some cash. “For your trouble.”

  She shook her head. “It’s no trouble. I love him already.”

  I almost said, Me too, but I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe admitting that would be admitting I’d completely lost control of this visit. I’d been sure of my plan when I’d left Charlotte yesterday. Now everything seemed up in the air.

  11

  I had a few hours to kill before my flight, so I drove aimlessly for a while, trying to think. The rational side of me knew I shouldn’t waste one more second here. It was like standing at the entrance of a bad dream and realizing the whole experience could be easily avoided. Yet there were things worse than bad dreams. There was life and trying to live it without closure. I didn’t believe my father was alive, but that didn’t mean the possibility wouldn’t haunt me.

  So I just drove. I tried not to think and to instead enjoy the scenery, the brief glimpse of a place that, under different circumstances, I could have loved.

  Before I knew it, I was on Pointer Mountain, heading up to the old church.

  Despite my better instincts, I couldn’t resist. I’d not been inside its doors since I was seventeen, and I was curious to see if the reality of it matched the version I’d kept for so long in my memories. Burt told me it had been badly burned in a fire in the late nineties and Daddy had moved the congregation to a bigger and better facility on the outskirts of Riley, so I felt like it was a safe place to try to deal with some of the demons of my past.

  The first thing I noticed when I pulled up was the old churchyard. It was well taken care of, something I probably should have suspected, knowing Lester, but it stood in stark contrast to the rest of the area, which was overgrown with kudzu and every kind of creeping vine.

  I stopped the rental in front of the old church and took it in. The fire had burned off the back half of the building, but the actual sanctuary was still standing. I got out of the truck and immediately felt the heat. I went back for my Braves hat and then headed over to the cemetery. I walked straight to Mama’s grave. She’d died of pneumonia a few years after I’d been bitten by the cottonmouth. I’d missed her funeral—not by choice—and it was something that ate at me nearly every day.

  I turned back to look at the old church. For a moment, I swore I heard the strains of an old gospel hymn coming from within the moldering walls. It was very faint, little more than a whisper, so I let it go despite the uneasy feeling it gave me.

  Beside Mama’s headstone was another, larger one. It marked the grave of my father. I knelt in f
ront of it and read the inscription.

  Ronald Jackson Marcus 1940–2016

  God’s True Servant

  “So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”

  Daddy had always claimed death was the ultimate victory. It was only then that our salvation would come to fruition, and only then would we at last be able to drop the heavy burdens of our earthly existence.

  Except he had meant more than that, hadn’t he?

  Even as far back as my teenage years, he’d told his intimate friends that he believed God had chosen him to defy death. That he could say it with a straight face revealed not only his prodigious arrogance but also his willingness to fall into his own echo chamber without even the slightest nod toward self-examination. Daddy’s words were like the chicken and the egg paradox. It was a fool’s game to try to figure out if he spoke his beliefs or simply believed what he spoke.

  “Can I help you?” came a voice from behind me.

  I was so startled, I stepped back and banged my heel against another headstone.

  I turned and saw a tall, rangy man wearing large sunglasses standing behind me. He had on a pair of old farmer’s overalls and a black T-shirt underneath. His hair was as black as the T-shirt, and his face was gaunt, his lips a pale pink. His age was nearly impossible to determine, and later it would dawn on me exactly why: there was something about the man that seemed to suggest he had already died and been reborn, not in some glorious fashion, hauled up from the earth whole by God himself, but in some hardscrabble, backcountry, middle-finger-to-death way. I suspected the rebirth might be a film that could only be played once because the scene (flickering in spasms of white light against a dirty wall inside some godforsaken place in these very mountains) would break the projector and, possibly, the viewer’s sanity.

  He just stared at me, his mouth set in straight line, those large shades hiding any thought or expression or humanity. For a moment, I could only stare back, unable to act on the overwhelming urge to get in the truck and head to the airport as fast as the rental would carry me.

  The man was a ghoul, a mountain zombie of a man, a scene spliced onto the cutting room floor straight from a horror film.

  And yet, despite all that . . . I recognized him.

  “I’ll be on my way,” I said, finally finding my voice.

  “Who are you?”

  “Earl,” I said, but that somehow seemed insufficient. My last name was out of the question, but it still felt like I needed to say more. “I’m just visiting my mama’s grave.”

  He nodded.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m going to head back to my truck now.”

  He didn’t move, which was unfortunate because he was blocking the path to my truck. I’d have to go around my daddy’s headstone to get over there, and it felt like doing so would show him I was scared.

  Like he didn’t already know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice was the kind of voice that stuck to your eardrums. I recognized it. There was no forgetting that kind of deep, slow drawl.

  “For what?” I said.

  “I think sometimes I startle folks.”

  “Naw,” I lied.

  He shifted his feet slightly, holding his hands out to the side until he felt a headstone with each. It was then I realized what was off about him: he was blind. I was a fool to have missed it. The shades, the way he didn’t seem to understand he was blocking my exit.

  Or maybe he did understand. Maybe I wasn’t giving the blind enough credit.

  “You sound familiar,” he said and moved closer, deftly sidestepping the same grave I’d banged my heel against. He held out a skeletal claw, and I saw his veins were visible like thick purple worms beneath his pale skin. “I’m Rufus Gribble.”

  I held out my hand and felt his enfold mine. He pumped once and then let go.

  “What did you say your last name was, Earl?”

  “I didn’t say, actually.”

  “Well, will you say?”

  “Look, I’m just passing through. I don’t want any trouble. Just wanted to see my mother’s grave and then head out.”

  “You must have gone to the Holy Flame,” he said.

  “No . . .”

  “Sure you did. Ain’t nobody buried up here ’less they went to the Flame. You say your name is Earl?”

  “I gotta get going,” I said.

  “Hell, you ain’t Earl Marcus, are you?”

  “No. You’ve got me confused.”

  “Oh, I hear it now.” His face brightened a bit. He almost looked . . . normal. “Your voice. It’s changed. Lost a little of its hillbilly, gained a little city, but I’m going to say you’re the prodigal son, come back after all these many long years. Yep, I don’t doubt it now. Earl Marcus.”

  How could I keep denying it? “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Can’t say that I do.”

  “I ain’t surprised. I look a sight different. Or so I hear. Let me see if this helps. I always sat right up front with my mama. Wore a suit and tie every service. Hell, you probably hated me. I was one of them pious motherfuckers.”

  And that was all it took. I remembered him. And to say he’d changed was an understatement. He’d been overhauled, re-created. I had hated Rufus once. I’d hated him the same way I hated everybody that bought into my father’s shit. But Rufus was special. He’d always been Daddy’s special snowflake because he never rocked the boat—always on time, always with his pretty mama. I did remember exactly where they sat—first row, right in front of Daddy. I even remembered when Rufus held his snake in front of the congregation. I must have been eight or nine, which meant he was about nine or ten years older than me. I couldn’t get over his transformation. He’d been nothing but a feckless choirboy when I last saw him. Now . . . now, he was something else.

  I couldn’t even say what. But it definitely wasn’t a choirboy.

  “I look different, don’t I?”

  “Yeah. You, uh, you live around here?”

  “Matter of fact, I do. I heard you were a big detective up in North Carolina now.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a little surprised anyone kept up.”

  “We ain’t all fundamentalists anymore.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s progress.”

  He grinned, and when he did, he was transformed to a man who kept his joy close to his vest for fear of losing it.

  “Well, that’s all we can hope for, right? Progress. Nobody gets to change where he starts, but every man can control where he goes.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

  “You say you’re here visiting mama and daddy’s graves?”

  “Yeah, it’s been a while.”

  “A while? That’s an understatement. You didn’t even come back for your daddy’s funeral.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Not that I blame you. He was a special kind of asshole, that one. After seeing what he did to you, I finally found what I needed inside to get the hell out. You inspired me. Bet you didn’t know that, Earl Marcus.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Yep, I left the church on a Sunday when I was twenty-six, not long after you left yourself. I got myself lost in these mountains, and that’s not just a figure of speech. I tried to get lost, and lost I was. It felt like something I had to do. I’d spent my whole life pretending I was found, that I had it all figured out—’cause that’s how Mama raised me, and I didn’t question it, at least not very much—so it felt like the right thing to do, to get lost. To just embrace it, you know?”

  It made a weird, poetic kind of sense, and part of me envied his clearheadedness. I might have been his inspiration, but when I quit the church, it was a true struggle. I vacillated between feeling damned and feeling free, but mostly I just felt miserable, isolated from eve
ryone who loved me.

  And guilty. I felt very guilty.

  There was a long silence. I looked at Rufus, and it was almost as if he was remembering my guilt too.

  “You had a hard road,” he said. “But I’m glad you come back. Want to come in for a drink?”

  “Come in?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t tell you? I live in the old church.”

  “You live in the old Holy Flame?”

  He grinned. “It keeps me honest. Plus, it’s in a great location. Ghost Creek less than three hundred yards that way. Good fishing. Easy access for my visitors. And I can walk to work.”

  “Work?”

  “Your brother pays me a hundred dollars a week to keep this cemetery up.”

  “But you’re . . .” I hesitated. I didn’t know what the rules were about these things.

  “Blind? You are an observant man, Earl. But that’s the best part about this cemetery. I had what you might call a death fetish when I was younger. Oh, you probably don’t remember because you were just a kid, but I used to come out to this graveyard all the time and just sit, reading the headstones, thinking about the people, their bones, how they felt in the moment they realized their life was ending. I got the whole thing memorized now. Besides, if I mess up, I always know it because I run up against one of the headstones. You like whiskey?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  * * *

  And that was how I ended up not only missing my flight back to Charlotte but also making peace with the old church.

  Well, “peace” might be too strong a word. Call it a temporary cease-fire.

  We drank and told tales of the very old days, mostly him filling in the blanks of stories I only half-remembered from my childhood. We kept it light, and at no time did he mention his blindness, just as I never mentioned what happened to me after the snakebite. Likewise, we each accepted the other’s silence on these issues. It was a kind of mutual, unspoken distance that somehow brought us closer together. We understood some things were better left alone.

  It was dark inside the old sanctuary, which I supposed made perfect sense for a blind man, but he lit a few candles so I could look around. The memories came back so fast and strong that I could see them like patterned images backlit by the flickering candles: the approximate place I used to sit with Lester and Mama near the front of the sanctuary; the congregation rising as one when Aunt Mary Lee began her hesitant fingering of the old piano; Daddy’s smiling yet severe face as one of the ushers—sometimes even Rufus—placed the wooden box of serpents at his feet; my mother’s hand on my back, reassuring me during a moment that was supposed to about grace but felt more like condemnation; Lester and me slipping out the back door as teenagers, hearing the sounds of my father’s sermon ringing in our ears even as we left the little church behind and slipped away to Ghost Creek to drink moonshine pilfered from Herschel Knott’s private stash.