Heaven's Crooked Finger

by Hank Early

  Behind the well, I saw three girls all wearing sheer white dresses. They were on their knees, facedown as if in prayer or mourning. One of them was Baylee. I recognized her deep-black hair, even as soaked and wild as it was now.

  Finally, there was a single figure standing to my right. He was tall and faceless because of a hood he wore pulled tight to hide his features.

  I felt a chill thrum through my body. If it was Daddy . . .

  The figure spoke, his voice piercing the rain and thunder. It was a wild, nearly inhuman keening that felt as if it had been elevated somehow to a place of supreme and unquestioned authority.

  But the voice didn’t belong to my father. That should have given me some relief.

  It didn’t. There was too much evidence staring me in the face that he lived.

  I made myself focus on the words of the hooded man. He turned to me, revealing his face. I gasped when I saw it was Daddy’s closest advisor and Lester’s biggest supporter, Billy Thrash.

  “I’ve spoken to your father,” Thrash said. His usually jovial tone had vanished. His voice sounded solemn, as if he were imparting news of a great tragedy. I supposed in a way he was. “As always, his faith demands we not give into our irrational hatreds and instead let God above be the judge of these sinners.”

  “Amen,” Choirboy shouted. “He is good! He is just!” I wasn’t sure if he was talking about God or my father, but I decided, in the end, it didn’t matter much.

  “Hook them up,” Thrash shouted.

  Before I could argue, Choirboy lashed the end of my wire over a little spike in the pole protruding from the well. Then he reached for Mary’s to do the same.

  “Leave her out of it,” I said. “She’s innocent. Just me.”

  There was a pause where no one spoke. Then Thrash said, “No. He has ordered them all to be judged.”

  Choirboy hooked Mary up. Shaw had moved to the other side of the well and was working on doing the same for the three girls.

  He latched Baylee’s wire to the pole last, and her face was pitiful to behold: resigned and defeated. I understood in a sudden flash of insight exactly why Allison and Maggie had killed themselves. This was the kind of trauma you didn’t run away from. Not that it had ever been easy to run away from the Holy Flame, especially if you were female.

  “Now!” Thrash shouted. “Let there be lightning!”

  Shaw and Choirboy shuffled away, moving to the far side of the ridge, putting as much distance as possible between them and the well. Thrash did the same, though he took his time, moving with a deliberate pace as if unconcerned about the possibility of lightning striking before he wanted it to.

  For a moment, nothing happened. The worst of the storm appeared to be over. I scanned the other faces—the hopeless misery in the three girls who had been here before, who obviously knew the pain that was coming; Lester’s confused countenance, no less miserable than the girls; and finally Mary’s. She was looking at the sky.

  Waiting on the lightning? Or was she looking for something else?

  I followed her lead and looked up. An awesome thundercloud churned above us, and it was easy to imagine it as the anger of an indignant God. But what or who was his anger directed toward? The answer to that question seemed to be the key to everything, the difference between hope and despair, life and death.

  I felt it before I saw it. A charge in the air, a prickling of every inch of my skin, and then the sky was alive, alight, scored with the greatest power I’d ever seen.

  The ground jumped up and smacked me in the face. My body felt like it was on fire, and my hands flew apart, the wire on my wrists disintegrated. I was too dazed to move. The lightning coursed through my body in spasms of heat, or maybe it was just my muscles continuing to contract because of the electric shock. Either way, I’d never felt like this before. Every piece of me was charged and buzzing, and inside my skull, I felt a thousand ants crawling.

  Time slipped away from me, and my senses registered only light and staccato bursts of sound and waves of deep, bone-rattling vibrations.

  Some interminable time later, Choirboy leaned over me, leering, the white pus from his cheek threatening to drip onto my skin. “Alive,” he said. “He’s even awake.”

  “Lash him back up,” Thrash said.

  Choirboy produced a new wire and reached for my hands. As he did this, I heard Roger, or maybe it was Shaw, say, “Dead.”

  I struggled to rise in order to see who he was talking about. I prayed it wasn’t Mary or Baylee. When I sat up, I saw him dragging one of the other girls out of the way. Mary was sitting up nearby, as were Baylee and the third girl.

  As they prepared us for another blast, Lester complained loudly, “I want to see him. You promised me I’d get to see him.”

  “He doesn’t want to see you anymore,” Thrash said. “He said to tell you that you need to ask for forgiveness for your sins again.”

  “I’ve done that,” Lester said, and his voice was surprisingly strong. “Either God forgives or he doesn’t. I want to see my father.”

  Thrash laughed. “You want the truth? He told me today he was disappointed in you both. He said he was at the point where he couldn’t understand why God had inflicted such boys on him, and then the Lord spoke. He said the two of you were trials for him, nothing more.”

  “That’s not true,” Lester said. He charged at Thrash, and Choirboy had to let go of me before he got the wire tied properly. I struggled to my feet, and the wire fell away. Roger shouted when he saw me going after Choirboy, but he’d laid his gun down too in order to lash Baylee back up. Choirboy turned to ward off my charge, but it was too late.

  I was already swinging. My fist landed in the waste of his wound, and I felt the splintering of bone beneath my knuckles. He dropped into the mud, not making a sound. I believed I might have killed him.

  Something too sharp to be thunder sounded nearby. Roger grabbed his gun and shot at me. I dropped into the mud beside Choirboy and found my 9mm tucked into his waistband.

  I sat up firing, my first shot hitting the well, beveled stone exploding in all directions like shrapnel. My second shot hit Roger in the leg and spun him around. I was about to finish him with the third when I felt my skin prickling again. I looked up in time to see it, another God-almighty blast from heaven. The entire sky seemed to turn to lightning, and it was daytime for an instant. In the daylight, we all looked so absurd—Thrash wearing his hood while Lester punched him in the face, Mary’s face aghast as she looked at the wire on her wrist, Baylee and the other girl waiting patiently like handmaidens on the king.

  And the king, I realized, was in the sky.

  It hit, and the world went sideways. I saw fire, angels and demons, a great bird careening among the stars above, shaking left and right, dipping its sharp wings dangerously close to us all. I felt the blast in the top of my head, my hair standing on end, and I heard Lester still pounding flesh with his fists.

  The rain slowed, and the fire rose. I focused my eyes in the near dark and saw that one of the girls—not Baylee—had slipped out of her dress, which now rose in the wind. I watched it float away like a ghost into the rainy sky.

  I spotted Baylee. She was free from her constraints and standing near the side of the ridge, precariously close to stepping off into nothing. I shouted at her, but she ignored my call.

  Someone grabbed my shoulder.

  I turned, ready to fight, but it was Mary. She flashed me a worried smile. “He never got the other end hooked up,” she said, holding out her wrists. They were still tied together with a thin wire.

  I started to help her get them off, but she stopped me. “Forget it. Go after him.”

  “Who?”

  She was about to answer when a sound I’d been hearing but not really recognizing grew louder. We both looked up.

  A helicopter was trying to land.

  “I’ll get these girls clear,” Mary said.

  I nodded and looked around. Choirboy was still down. So was
Roger. But where were Lester and Thrash?

  And Shaw?

  I glanced back at the chopper. “Georgia State Patrol” was printed on the side. I didn’t have any idea how Mary had contacted them, but it was a damned miracle.

  “Make sure these girls are okay,” I shouted to her before trotting back inside the mountain to find my brother and Billy Thrash.

  And maybe even my father.

  60

  I didn’t have a light, but it didn’t take me long to find them. There was the blood for one thing. I felt it streaked against the cavern walls, traced it with my fingers as I moved in the blackness. Then I heard their ragged breathing, the grunts and moans as the two men fought.

  Occasionally, Lester would beg to see Daddy, and Thrash would try to say something, but then he’d never get the words out. I assumed because Lester had punched him again.

  I was still shaken by the two blasts. The first had gotten under my skin, made me tingle and ache. The second had thrown me to the ground with a concussive blast strong enough that my ears were still ringing. But I was alive. Mary was alive. Baylee too, at least for the moment, was alive.

  Only time would tell if she would remain so.

  I rounded a corner, and there they were, blocking the passage, trading blows, staggering like heavy shadows in the deep dusk of the cavern.

  “Lester,” I said, “it’s Earl. I’ve got a gun, but I need to get a clear shot.”

  A body flew against mine, knocking me back. I recovered and aimed the gun down at Thrash.

  “Shoot him,” Lester said.

  “I plan to.”

  Thrash laughed. “You boys came all this way, but I have to tell you something . . .”

  “Go on,” Lester said. “Say it.”

  “Ain’t nobody seen your father. Bryant McCauley was just a fool. I thought maybe he was right for a little bit, but then I realized he was full of it, and I decided I could play that game better than him. He didn’t even know where the well was. He’d been going to your daddy’s old sanctuary on Ring Mountain. It was easy to convince Choirboy that McCauley was just crazy, that I was the one who really had your daddy’s ear. God, it was so easy. And you know what? It was right too. I served your daddy for so long while he had all the power. While he made all the decisions. Was only fair for me to get a chance.”

  I almost pulled the trigger, but I had one more question to ask.

  “But why do what you’re doing to these girls? What’s the point?”

  He laughed. “You’ve always been so stupid, Earl. I’ll bet your brother knows. Tell him, Lester.”

  Lester was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Because it was what Daddy would have done. It made everyone believe.”

  That cut me to my core, and suddenly I didn’t want to shoot Thrash anymore. I wanted to shoot myself. I’d come from that man, and even though he was a fool, there was no questioning his capacity to do evil in this world. I’d fallen victim to it myself. All my rebellion, all my anger, and all my guilt was because of him.

  “Get up,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  He struggled to his feet.

  “Where are we going?” Lester said.

  I took a deep breath. “Back out to the well. It’s time to put an end to this.”

  61

  They found Shaw’s broken body a few days later on a rocky ledge some fifty feet below the well. It wasn’t clear if he jumped or simply fell. I like to imagine Baylee pushed him. She had been standing near the ledge where he fell.

  If she did push him, she wasn’t talking about it. In fact, the last I’d heard, she wasn’t talking at all. She and her sister had been moved to a foster home in Riley. I’d tried to visit them the other day, but when I showed up and the mother—a nice-looking woman who seemed well-intentioned enough—saw my bruised face, she shook her head and refused to let me see either girl. I took this as a good sign. At least she was being cautious.

  Lester, Thrash, and Roger were all taken into custody, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigations moved into the sheriff’s office and provided a police presence in the tumultuous days that followed.

  My own first couple of days after that night were tumultuous too, so much so, they later became a blur to me. I did remember being in a hospital bed and looking at my arm and seeing the same marks I’d seen on Baylee, except mine were deeper, more like my blood vessels had snapped and all the blood had risen to the surface of the skin in some preordained pattern. I remembered Mary coming to see me once or twice and then a stream of investigators taking statements, making notes, and asking follow-up questions.

  I explained it all the best that I could, including what I’d been doing at Burt’s place. Eventually, all the charges against me were dropped, and the investigators, mostly state police, even stopped treating me like I was some kind of pervert.

  As I explained my story to the investigators, all of it seemed to make sense.

  Almost.

  McCauley was a madman, an extremist who couldn’t take my father’s death, so he kept him alive, deluding himself and—to some extent—Lester and me, not to mention many others in the church who so badly wanted to believe in my father’s immortality. It was funny because all I ever wanted was to see my father as a man.

  Billy Thrash believed it too but decided to verify it, and when he realized McCauley was simply pretending, he stole the idea and ran with it, using his connection to Daddy to exert power over the church and to become the true authority in all matters, even while Lester was still the figurehead. Like Hank Shaw, he had long resented my father but had lacked the courage to confront him in life. My father had that effect on people. But once he’d died, Thrash didn’t hesitate to capitalize, gaining all that power and more because, as I’d suspected, the congregation responded to an “ascended” preacher even better than they did a living one. Of course, he had to get Hank Shaw on board, but that was an easy thing, considering the sheriff’s own resentment against my father. What the two men ultimately wanted to accomplish with this power was beyond me. Like my father, Hank Shaw and Billy Thrash were men driven by forces I didn’t believe even they understood.

  I believed Thrash’s mistake was when he started going after the young girls again. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could happen in today’s world. Maybe for a while if you had the sheriff on your side, but not long term. Still, without some good luck and foresight from Mary, he might have continued the torture, and with the threat of torture came an absolute kind of power that must have been too much for Billy Thrash to resist.

  Mary’s foresight was one of the things I thought about the most in the days I lay in the hospital bed. Even when they released me and Mary showed up to take me back to Granny’s, it was the first thing I asked her about.

  “I went with my gut. When you went inside your brother’s house, I had some time to think. I figured we were going to be heading into the mountains. I also figured we might not be coming back. So I called a friend at the GBI. Told him if he didn’t hear from me within the next two hours, to send out a chopper.”

  “And he didn’t question you? I mean, that’s some trust,” I said.

  She smiled and turned onto Granny’s gravel drive. “We have history,” she said. “He knows me.”

  I nodded, willing myself not to feel jealous. I wasn’t sure where I stood with Mary exactly. We’d had the one night in the jail cell, but there was still the age gap, and the last thing an older man should do if he wanted to be with a younger woman is get jealous. So I let it go. At least I tried to let it go.

  Hell, I tried to let a great number of things go, but I couldn’t quite do it.

  One thing still bothered more than the rest.

  But before I could say anything to Mary about it, Granny’s place came into view. The day was mild for late June, and Granny was sitting in the cast-iron rocker in the front yard. Beside her were two kids I recognized. Maybe I should have been surprised to see them there wit
h Granny, but I wasn’t. This was who she was. Who she would always be until she was no more. A helper, a guide. A friend when everyone else had abandoned you.

  Millie noticed me first, and I cut down the window and waved. Todd got up from his seat and limped over to the Tahoe, grinning proudly at how well he was moving.

  I got out of the car and reached to take his hand, but he bypassed my hand and went for the big embrace. When I let go, Millie was standing there waiting for the same thing.

  She kissed my cheek and whispered, “Thanks.” Then she held out my credit card. “We only charged a few things on it. It comes to seventy dollars. I’m going to mail the money back when we get it.”

  I shook my head. “No, you’re not. Don’t even think about it.”

  She blushed and pulled her hair back. It was hard to see her as the same girl who’d held the shotgun on me in the shack just a few nights before. She seemed revitalized, and she glowed with an interior light that made me feel good inside.

  My mind turned involuntarily to Baylee. The good feeling went away when I realized Millie had just barely escaped. So many—Maggie, Allison, and now Baylee—had not been so lucky.

  I walked over to see Granny next. She had struggled to her feet to greet me, and I embraced her, nearly lifting her wasted body off the ground as she clung to me with all her might.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.” I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking to me.

  * * *

  I visited Lester in his cell a few days later. He was in bad shape, and I could see why Mary said they had him on suicide watch. He was a man possessed—not by a demon, but instead by a dead man. He’d never get his chance to see Daddy again, to please Daddy again. Most folks wouldn’t understand why this was so important, but I did. For the first sixteen or seventeen years, Daddy was how I measured myself as a man. He was my role model, everything I aspired to be. For Lester, this feeling had lasted a lifetime, boring itself into his very identity. He’d become a shell without Daddy’s approval.