At first they just froze. But then, from the darkness, came a deep voice that said, “Leave here.”
Judd was the first to scream and run for the woods, with Burl and Ted chasing after him. They stumbled and fell and scrambled up and hurled themselves through the pines. Once they reached the T-bird, Judd’s shaking hands fumbled the keys so many times that Ted finally took them away from him, shoved him into the back seat, and sped out of the hollow.
When they had made it a safe distance down the highway, Ted grinned and said, “Anybody besides me need to change his britches?”
Burl threw his head back and laughed. “That was crazy! My mama might have to rock me to sleep tonight!”
“Ha! Bet you’ll leave the closet light on.”
“Gonna wear my footie pajamas and everything.” Burl laughed again. “Man, that scared the you-know-what outta me—but now that we know we ain’t gonna die, it was a gas.”
Judd was silent.
“Hey, Highland, you back there?” Ted asked, winking at Burl.
Judd didn’t answer.
“Highland! You still with us?” Ted repeated, glancing into the rearview mirror. Judd was huddled into a corner, staring out the window. “Are you—”
“Just shut up and drive,” Judd said, his answer barely audible.
Twenty
APRIL 23, 1967
Dovey stood in the churchyard, waiting for Pete. He was helping some of the men move the pulpit furniture out of the way for a wedding coming up next weekend. She was thinking that she needed to remind him to take her by Aunt Babe’s before Sunday lunch so they could drop off the basket of flowers Dovey had fixed for her.
“Sure enjoyed your music, Dovey,” Miss Willadean said on the way to her car.
Dovey smiled and thanked her. For the first time, she had worked up the nerve to sing with a quartet from the choir, and everybody said they sounded good enough for the August singing.
The churchyard was almost empty when Ladonna Bunch approached her. Ladonna never talked to Dovey.
“Well, how does it feel to be a celebrity?” she asked sweetly.
“Everybody’s been real nice about our singing,” Dovey said.
“Oh, not here—I mean at school.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Didn’t Pete tell you? He nearly got hisself expelled takin’ up for you last week. Decked Judd Highland. Everybody’s talkin’ about it. ’Course, Judd should not have said what he did about you—but you can’t really blame him for thinkin’ it, no offense. You’d think Pete would be used to those kinda remarks by now, but I reckon he just snapped. Guess you got yourself a genuine knight in shinin’ armor. Well, you all have a nice afternoon. Bye now.”
Dovey couldn’t move, but her whole body was trembling and her face felt red-hot. Pete came out of the church just as the tears welled up in her eyes and she ran for his truck. He sprinted after her, but she jumped in and locked her door before he could get to her. He hurried around to the driver’s side before she could lock that too. She couldn’t stop sobbing—heaving and sobbing—and she wouldn’t let him touch her.
“Dovey! What’s happened? What’s wrong? Please, tell me!” He kept reaching for her, but she kept pushing him away.
“All this time,” she kept saying over and over. “All this time.”
“All this time what?” he said.
“All this time,” she managed between sobs, “all those—kids have been—making fun of you for being with me, and you’ve been—taking it, and you—you—kept it from me.”
“Dovey, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Ladonna said—you hit Judd—because of me.”
He sighed and put his head down on the steering wheel. “Why on earth did that hateful alley cat have to tell you?”
“Well—is it—true? Is it?”
“Yes.”
“And you wasn’t—weren’t—gonna tell me?”
He sat up and looked at her. “Of course not.”
“What do you mean—‘of course not’? What else aren’t you tellin’—telling—me? What else are you—having to—take at that school—because of me?”
“Dovey, I—”
“Please take me home.”
“You’ve got to let me—”
“Please take me home.”
When they pulled into her front yard, she bailed out of the truck before Pete could completely stop and ran past her father, who was sitting on the front porch. Pete started after her, but her father stood up and put an arm out to stop him.
Dovey hurried to her bedroom. Through the open window, she could hear them talking and prayed her father could make Pete go away.
“What’s goin’ on?” Dovey’s father was saying.
Pete told him what had happened in the churchyard.
“Go home, Pete,” her father said.
“But I can’t leave her like this! I’ve got to—”
“You’ve got to go home and let me talk to her.”
“But—”
“Look, I trust you to do what’s best for Dovey every time she walks out that door with you. And it ain’t easy. Now I’m askin’ you to trust me even if it ain’t easy. Go on home and let me talk to her. When she’s ready, she’ll call you.”
“Wait—y’all have a phone now?” Pete asked.
“I want her to be able to call home if she needs to—just like any other girl her age,” her father said.
“Mister John, I don’t think I can stand sittin’ home and waitin’ for that phone to ring.” As the two of them had grown closer, Pete had stopped calling him “Mr. Pickett” and made the old Southern adjustment of adding “Mister” to his first name.
“Yes you can. Everything’s gonna be alright. Just trust me.”
Dovey watched from her window as her father walked Pete to his truck and then hurled herself onto the bed and buried her face in a pillow.
Her father came in and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Sit up, honey. I wanna talk to you.” He arranged the pillows against the headboard and brushed at her tears with his fingertips as she sat up and tried to get hold of herself.
“So Pete—told you—what happened,” she said in a teary hiccup. Her father nodded. “How could he—do that, Daddy? How could he—keep—such a secret from me?”
“He loves you,” he said.
“But you don’t—hide things—from people you love!”
“Sometimes you have to.”
Dovey frowned. “But you never hid things from Mama.”
“Yes I did.”
“But Daddy—”
“Dovey, honey, how did you feel yesterday? Were you happy, sad . . . ?”
She was confused. “I—I was h-happy. I was with Pete at the—f-flea market and we were h-having a good time.”
“And how do you feel now?”
“Like I wanna die.”
“Well, now you know why he didn’t tell you. He came by the shop on Friday and told me what happened at school.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense! Why would he tell you and not me?”
“Because he wanted me to keep an eye out for you in case any football players took a notion to come meddlin’ around here over the weekend. He wanted to protect you.”
She had calmed down and stopped sobbing, but the tears kept on flowing. “Daddy, I’m so mixed up.”
“Move over,” he said. She slid over on the bed so they could sit next to each other. He held her hand and took a deep breath. “Did I ever tell you . . . how I met your mother?”
Dovey shook her head. She couldn’t believe this was happening. For so long now she had wanted to know about her parents’ life together, but she never asked because she didn’t want to bring on more sadness for her father.
“I was nineteen,” he began. “Your mother was seventeen. Your Uncle Adam had run a trotline across the river, and he sent me to gather up the jugs and see what he’d caught. After I got all his fish in, I decided
to take the boat into a little slough and try my luck with the bream. I was fishin’ pretty close to the bank when I heard somebody—a girl—callin’ for help. So I rowed in and followed those cries to your mother.”
“Why was she crying?”
“She had stepped in a rabbit hole and twisted her ankle. Couldn’t walk.”
“I’ll bet she was surprised to see you.”
He smiled. “Sure was. I guess she was expectin’ one of her brothers or sisters to hear her.” He got quiet, and Dovey was afraid he wouldn’t be able to finish.
“Did she think you were handsome?”
“I’m pretty sure she thought I was crazy. I just couldn’t quit starin’ at her. My whole life, I’d never seen anything so beautiful. I just . . .” He stopped again.
Dovey urged him on. “So then what happened?”
“I finally managed to talk—asked her what her name was and told her mine.”
“And what did she say?”
“She just looked up at me and said my name. Sure sounded different when she said it.”
“Then what?” Dovey prompted, but he didn’t speak. “Daddy?”
“Well, I asked her if I could carry her wherever she needed to go, and she said yes.”
“And did you?”
“I picked her up, and she put her arms around me, and I carried her back to the little shanty where she lived. That’s where her lunatic daddy threatened to blow my head off.”
“But he got to liking you later, right?”
“That old moonshiner was as crazy as the day is long—and twice as mean. He didn’t love your mother. She was just another mouth to feed and another kid to work to death. And he sure didn’t have any use for me.”
“Well then, how did you end up together?”
“When I laid her down on a cot there in the house, she whispered to me to please come back to the slough just before sunrise some morning—likely because she knew her daddy would still be sleepin’ one off that early. So I did. I went every morning before daylight for three straight days, and nothin’. But then on the fourth day, there she was, standin’ on the bank just as the sun came up. Me and your mother, we met three or four times at that slough, and then I talked her into crossin’ the river with me. Your Papa Hinkey went with us to the justice of the peace and convinced him she was an orphan with nobody to sign her permission, and we got married.”
“Didn’t her family come looking for her?”
“No, honey. Nobody ever did. But it was for the best because she found a real family here.” Then he told her about Jack and Lila and the friendship that had to end. “Dovey, your mother was a gift from heaven, and I loved her so much I just about couldn’t stand it. But part of her never got free of that shanty. The only place she ever felt safe was right here in this hollow. She just couldn’t believe that she could belong out there in the world. And that cost her. It cost both of us. You too. If I’d sent you to school when you were little, you wouldn’t be afraid of it now, but your mother was always so scared somebody was gonna take you away from her. So between her and Mama . . . I let you down, Dovey. Your mother couldn’t help it, but I knew better, and I let you down. I shoulda sent you to school.
“I can’t change what happened back then. But you and me, we can decide what happens from here on out. You gotta make up your mind how it’s gonna be for you, honey. Because there’s all kinda Ladonnas in this world. They’re gonna do whatever they’re gonna do. So you got to decide. You gonna let them tell you who you are, or you gonna decide that for yourself?”
She thought about that as she wiped her eyes. Then she squeezed his hand and kissed it. “I think I’ll decide,” she said with a smile.
“That’s my girl.” He put his arms around her. “Now, what we gonna do about that boyfriend of yours?”
Lila looked out her kitchen window to see John’s truck pulling into her backyard. “Pete!” she called when she saw Dovey get out. “Son, Dovey’s here.”
Pete raced downstairs and out the kitchen door, and didn’t stop till he had Dovey in his arms.
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” she kept repeating.
John walked past them to Lila, who was standing at her kitchen door. She grinned at him. “Are we just worn out with it all?”
He shook his head. She motioned for him to come into the kitchen as Pete and Dovey circled around the house for some privacy on the front porch.
“Can I get you anything?” Lila asked as John took a seat at her table.
“Not unless you got a shot of the devil’s brew, and I know a good Baptist like you ain’t got any.”
She opened a cabinet, pulled a bottle of bourbon from behind her cooking sherry, and set it on the table. “I’m Methodist on Mama’s side.” She smiled. “And you know what the Methodists say—everything in moderation.”
Pete and Dovey sat together in the front porch swing. They had their arms around each other, with her head on his shoulder. If they could have found a way to get any closer on his mother’s front porch with both of their parents in the kitchen, they would have.
She had begun to cry again when she first saw him, and he was still trying to soothe her. He began softly singing “Walkin’ After Midnight.”
She looked up at him with a weepy smile. “You think Patsy Cline can fix anything.”
“Never let me down yet,” he said, twirling a curly strand of her hair through his fingers. “I can’t stand to see you cry, Dovey. I love you too much to see you cry.”
“But why?” she asked.
“Why what?”
“Why do you love me so much?”
“Don’t you know?”
She shook her head. “No. And I think I need to. Why do you want to be with me instead of Ladonna and all those girls at school?”
“For the same reason I’d rather hold a kitten than a copperhead.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I. Look, Dovey, from the first time I saw you in those pink tennis shoes of yours with those ringlets in your hair, I thought . . . well, I don’t quite know what I thought. I just know I haven’t wanted to be two feet away from you since.”
“But what about when I’m old and all wrinkled up and I don’t have those ringlets anymore? Then why will you love me?”
“For your lovely singin’ voice.” He grinned. “No, wait a minute—that’ll be shot too.”
“I’m serious!” she said, but she was finally laughing.
“Dovey, if you don’t know by now that you’re special in just about every way a person can be—well, you’re just not payin’ attention. I love you. And I don’t want to be anywhere or do anything without you.” He grinned and added, “I did think about makin’ out with Ladonna once, but I was scared those buck teeth of hers would cut me all to pieces.”
“Hush!” She giggled and settled back onto his shoulder with a long, happy sigh.
“Dovey?”
“Hmm?”
“Why do you love me?”
She sat up again. “It’s your eyes.”
“What about when I get old and they’re covered up with glasses—you know, that yucky old-man kind with bifocals?”
“Won’t matter. I love ’em ’cause they see me like I wanna be, and I imagine they could still do that even with bifocals.” She ran her hand across his brow and down the side of his face, like she was memorizing the feel of it. “You’re all I ever wanted, and a whole lot more than I ever thought I’d have.”
He kissed her as they rocked in the swing, listening to the cicadas and watching the sky grow dim.
Just after midnight, a brand-new pickup sat idling at the edge of a cotton field deep in the hollow. Its headlights were shut off. Inside, Judd Highland was making up his mind to get even. And what better way to take revenge on McLean than to inflict some pain on his beloved backwoods trash?
It had been a lark, chasing a dead man’s ghost, but now even that was ruined. And the grip Judd had long held over Ted
and Burl was beginning to slip. He could feel it, just like with all the others before. Well, good riddance. Like his father always said, everybody’s expendable.
He gripped the steering wheel and revved the engine. With the windows rolled down, he half imagined he heard someone coming, but he was not backing down. Not this time. Switching on the headlights so he could see where he was going, he hit the gas and tore across the cotton field, laughing and whooping like a madman as he turned the wheel sharply, cutting big circles in the middle of the field, crushing more and more tender young plants with each spin of his wheels.
After stopping briefly to admire his handiwork, he was about to stomp the accelerator again when he heard a gunshot, and one of his front tires blew. He tried hitting the gas, but the flat tire only churned into the red clay, burying itself and anchoring the truck to the field.
In a panic, he bailed out, leaving the engine running, and sprinted as hard and fast as he could back to Hollow Road. He gave no thought to how he would recover the truck, what he would tell his father, or how much it would cost his parents to buy his way out of this one. He just ran and ran, his heart pounding with fear.
Twenty-one
APRIL 24, 1967
Ned Ballard stood beside the disabled pickup with the Pickett men and surveyed the damage. “Of all the stupidity,” he said, clenching his jaw and doing his best to mind his language.
“We never gave nobody call to do something like this.” Adam shook his head.
“No, you didn’t—but I know exactly who did it. I saw Whit Highland squirin’ around town in this new truck earlier this week. I don’t think he’d be fool enough to destroy property himself, but that son of his would.”
“There’s time to replant,” Adam said. “Barely enough, but I think we can do it.”
“I know this ain’t my field anymore, but if you’ll forgive me, I still feel attached to it. I’ve got some seed left over, and I can have it delivered to you this afternoon. I know you don’t care for outsiders on your farm, but if you need any help at all, why, you just let me know.”
Missing Isaac Page 15