by Billy Coffey
“You got a nerve, Tully Wiseman,” she said. “Coming to me for liquor and preying on my Christian sensibility. Then you use my jar to find the courage to go after a defenseless girl? What was in your mind?”
Tully was already crying. “It was Daisy,” he was saying. “My Flower’s sick. Please don’t hurt me, Chessie.”
Briar lifted Tully’s head, slammed it down again.
“Which hand was it?” Chessie asked. “Which one’d you hit her with?”
“Chessie, please. I’m sor—”
“Which hand?” she asked again, this time to Scarlett.
The girl looked as pale as Tully. Her hand trembled as she drew out her pen and pad. She wrote right.
Briar reached down and brought up Tully’s right arm, stretching it out onto the table. Tully struggled, but it was no use.
“I know your mind, Tully Wiseman,” Chessie said. “I know the kind of people you run with in the shadows, and I know ’twas y’all behind what’s happened to the kids here in town. You think I don’t, you’re even more stupid than I thought you was. But it stops. You hear me? It stops now. You get the word to the rest of your little Circle. You need proof to show how serious I am, you show them this.”
Her hand found was what closest. Not the cleaver (and Tully’ll spend the rest of his miserable life thankful at least for that), but the metal meat tenderizer he’d used that morning. A heavy thing, mottled on one end and tiny, dulled spikes on the other. She held it out to Scarlett.
“Go on,” Chessie said. “Eye for an eye, Scarlett Bickford. That’s how it is in the Holler.”
Scarlett shook her head.
“You can and you will. You take all that hurt and rage and you let it out. Stand up or bow down, girl. Right now.”
Friend, I won’t even pretend to know what went through Scarlett’s mind right then. She stood there shaking her head No, making her will known even to the likes of Chessie Hodge, and then that No became I shouldn’t, and that led to something like Maybe before Scarlett’s head stopped moving at all. Was hurt inside that girl. Hurt over a momma she didn’t have no more and a daddy who was intent upon fixing her with a future as bleak as her past. It was a rage over the Crow Holler witch. But it was more than that, friend. I know it was. There came a hurt as well. Bubbling up as it had when she’d run off at the mines and hurled those rocks and twigs at the night.
She strode forward. Tully now looked her way, begging her no, begging her pardon, screaming that he’d only been drunk and in sorrow for his child.
“Do it,” Chessie said.
Scarlett held out her hand. Chessie went to hand that filthy meat tenderizer over. Her grin melted when Scarlett refused to take it. Instead, she placed her hand atop Tully’s own. Shaking her head at Briar first, then at Chessie.
“Fool,” Chessie whispered. “Just like your daddy. This the way you think you’ll rid the town of what you wrought? Is it? Standing up for ones who’d sooner spit on you than help?”
Scarlett looked like she wanted to write something, but she wouldn’t move her hand from Tully’s.
“Fine, then,” Chessie said.
It was the spiked end a that tenderizer she brought down, doing it in a flash. Scarlett managed to move her hand at the last instant. You ask me if Chessie knew it would happen that way, I don’t know. All I know is she meant to teach Scarlett and Tully both a lesson.
The teeth on that tenderizer struck Tully in the back of his hand. His wail was a piercing agony so pure it sounded like death itself. Chessie swung it again, this time to the noise of bone breaking. Blood splattered the table, the side of Chessie’s face, Briar’s thick beard. Scarlett’s arm. Tully screamed again, so deep and long that all the air was gone from his lungs. And then he could only whimper.
-5-
Back at the mines where Hays Foster had built his fire the past Saturday night, Bucky sat on the hood of his car and tried acting like a real lawman. He held his phone to his ear and listened to what the voice on the other end said. Saying little and nodding much, like this was something he should’ve done two days before.
Only a dozen miles lie between Crow Holler and the town of Mattingly, but it might as well be a thousand. It’s a burden getting between there and here with those steep and winding roads between, and I guess that’s why we in the Holler decided over time it’d be better to stick to ourselves. But our two towns being so close as the crow flies, the Commonwealth of Virginia long ago decided in all its wisdom to include us in Mattingly’s jurisdiction when it come to matters of the law.
That put us under the eye of Mattingly’s sheriff, Jake Barnett. I’ll say I’ve had dealings with that man in the past, though indirectly. People in these parts respect him as much as we can an outsider. And I’ll give Jake this—he understood what’s good for the city folk up in Richmond usually ain’t for the mountains. We take care of our own here and punish those who need it, and we need nobody to tell us how. Jake made a drive through the hill country onced a week or so just to keep appearances, but that was it. We never needed authority until Alvaretta.
Now Bucky knew Jake well enough, having served as constable for so long. And it seemed then was as good a time as any to reach out, hoping Jake could give some guidance. Shame of it was, old Jake didn’t have much to give.
“You say how many girls are sick?”
“Near thirty,” Bucky said. “That’s my guess, anyway. Pretty much all the young ones in town. All girls, Jake. Not a boy yet among’m.”
“What’s your doctor say?”
“What any doctor would. But I don’t think you believe that as much as me or anybody else up here does, Jake. I’m at the mines now. Those tracks Cordy found are real. Something’s loose up here.”
“Anybody else been to see Alvaretta?”
“No.”
“Might have to be you then, Buck. Maybe somebody can reason with her.”
Bucky chuckled. “You think she’s one to reason with?”
“Want me to come up there?”
“No. I can handle this, Jake.”
“You sure?”
Bucky didn’t answer that—couldn’t, I expect. He nodded into the phone and hung up. Put his face in his hands, wondering what to do next. The answer came when his phone chirped again.
Angela, saying Tully’d hurt himself. Mashed his own hand somehow, drunk old fool that he was, and broken it good. Things were too busy at the grocery for anyone there to take him to Doc Sullivan’s, so would he? Bucky checked his watch and found it nearly two. He said sure, wasn’t like he had anything to do that afternoon. She told him to come around to the loading dock in back. He never asked her why.
He tried the Fosters next to check on Cordy and Hays. Kayann answered. She said she hadn’t heard anything about Tully and maybe she should go down to the grocery since they’d be shorthanded. Bucky laughed at that like he thought she was making a joke about Tully’s injury. Then he said maybe so. Once he got to the store, though, Bucky must’ve thought Kayann had been exactly right. Landis would need help that day. He would need Kayann and more.
The mess outside Foster’s was even bigger than what Bucky had found at the clinic the day before. Cars everywhere, trucks and clunkers and even some old farm tractors, all jammed into that lot. Bucky slowed to gawp at it all and caught sight of Briar’s truck and John David’s leaving off toward the farm. He pulled around back, weaving his way through traffic and waving to friends and neighbors who looked at him like he was a stranger.
Tully sat on an old stool propped against the dock’s wall. He’d found some ice and a dirty rag to wrap his hand in and held his wrist gentle, the same as he’d held his Daisy all the night before. His face had gone from the pale of fright to a suffering gray.
Bucky got out and said, “Have mercy, Tully. What’d you do?”
“Slipped,” he said. “Slipped is all.” And I guess Tully was right about that, if he was talking about losing what little sense he had long enough to put his hands on
Scarlett Bickford.
Bucky wanted to go inside and check on Angela, but Tully begged him no. All he wanted was to leave. Whole way to Doc’s office, he kept saying how sorry he was for what’d happened to Cordelia. A shame, Tully told him, and when Bucky said he’d always thought Tully a good man despite his demons, Tully started to cry.
It was at the doctor’s office where Bucky first heard of the grocery closing. Maris asked him. You could hear the doctor through the door of the exam room telling Tully he was worthless in one breath and feeling sorry for him in the next, asking how drunk a man had to be to mistake his own live hand for a slab of dead meat not once but again and again. Bucky said he’d heard no such thing about Landis closing up, but Maris told him people had been coming in saying it all day.
“You don’t think Landis would do that?” she asked. “Shut his doors because some idiot decided to turn his fear of Alvaretta into a rage against Hays?”
“No,” Bucky said. “Landis ain’t like that. But I was just over there to pick Tully up, and you ain’t never seen such a rush of people. He closes down, it’ll be because he’s run out of everything.”
“Run out?” A shadow fell over Maris’s face. “I never thought of that.”
“Could happen, I guess. Grocery ain’t so big that it could ever hold a lot. And since the trucks only come once a week or so . . .” Bucky shrugged. “Don’t make a difference though, does it? We ain’t in the South Pole, Maris. We can make do.”
“That ain’t the point, Bucky. The grocery ain’t just the grocery. We don’t just go there to get our milk and bread. We get our news there too. That’s where we go to connect with each other. If the church is the soul of this town, the grocery is its heart. Close it for a day or a week or forever, Bucky, you take that heart away.”
Tully walked out with his hand braced and bandaged. That would have to do until he could get up to the hospital for a proper cast. He promised the doc that would happen soon, but he never went. Tully was a no-count drunk who spent much of his time out in the woods with Raleigh Jennings and his merry band of racists, but he loved his child. Daisy was the world to that man, and seeing her suffer was enough to lay a crack in his otherwise stone heart. He wouldn’t leave her, even if it meant a trip to Stanley to take care of his broken bones. To this day, you greet Tully and he’ll offer his left hand instead of the misshapen claw on his right because half of him got ruined. Guess he turned out like Cordelia that way. Some would call that irony.
Bucky said he’d take Tully home. Maris wished them both well and promised she’d be praying. They were no more out the door than she told Danny to get his keys. She was gonna make a few calls first, then he had to take her to the store.
-6-
I guess now I come to it, friend. There’s gonna be harder parts to this story, I don’t doubt that and neither should you, but that don’t mean I’m looking forward to saying what comes next. It ain’t been easy, me sitting here with you. People catch me telling you all this—people like Bucky or John David or his momma, Belle, who I know’s peeking at us through one a the church windows—they’d have a fit. They don’t want nobody else to know, you see. Plenty already do, least down in Mattingly and all the other towns dotting these mountains, and that’s why they stay away.
Everything that happened up until Bucky sat in that waiting room with Maris? All of it could’ve unfolded as it did, and things still mighta turned out different. But what I’ll tell you now? That’s what led to everything else, the stuff with Wilson and Medric and Bucky and all the rest, all of it falling like a line of dominoes some ignorant soul kicked over on accident.
People think they’re free in life. Maybe they are for a while. But sooner or later all the choices you make narrow down to a single end, and that’s the only end you can meet. After what would happen at the grocery that evening, was but one way it could go for everybody in Crow Holler.
Doc Sullivan took Maris to Foster’s just like she’d asked. He said Landis wasn’t gonna do anything more’n call for a grocery truck a little earlier than usual, but Maris thought otherwise. “You don’t know this town like I do,” she said. “Be just like that man to close a couple days and reopen with prices twice as high as they were.” Well, Maris wasn’t gonna fall for that.
Neither would the two friends Maris had called to say what was going on. Course, both Helen Pruitt and Belle Ramsay had close friends too. As did those friends. And even though all of them to a person swore on all that was holy and good not to go and start a panic, that was all a lie. No other way to put it, friend.
It was near four thirty by the time Bucky brought Tully back to his home. Tully’s wife, Lorraine (a horrible woman, and if you’d spend a minute with her you’d know how right I am and why Tully drank so much), had pinned a note to the door. Three words were scrawled on the page—DAISY SLEEPING STORE!!! Bucky got some ice out of the freezer and a couple aspirin for Tully’s hand. Tully thanked Bucky again and said how he’d always liked Scarlett Bickford just fine.
Angela got off at five. Bucky was late getting there, but that didn’t matter. The lot at Foster’s was so jammed that even people couldn’t move around, let alone cars. Horns blowing, voices shouting and cussing. Customers ran out with bags pressed tight to their chests and sides, ready to pounce on any who dared steal what they’d bought honestly. The sun had fallen over the mountains by then. Even in springtime, evening comes to Crow Holler not much past four, casting all this hard part of the world into hours of dim dusk. Bucky parked nearer the Exxon than the grocery and started walking. Those who passed him never said a word. Their eyes were on the store instead, and how quick time could run out.
He found Raleigh Jennings, Joe Mitchell, and Homer Pruitt in a circle at the lot’s edge. I don’t believe Bucky had any intent to have a chat with the man who’d fired him just that morning, but Homer shouted, “What’s going on here, Bucky?” and Bucky felt a need to answer.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just came up here to get Angela.”
Somebody shouted up near the doors. All up there was a tangle of arms and legs.
“Grocery’s closing, Buck,” Raleigh said. “That’s the word.”
“Grocery ain’t closing. Where’d you get such a thing?”
“One I got it from said she got it from Angela.”
“From Angela? No, Raleigh. That can’t be right.”
“Looks it to me,” Homer said. “Helen come in earlier and said wasn’t much left. Now she’s back in there getting what she can.”
Joe Mitchell spoke up: “You heard what happened to Tully, Buck?”
“I did. Took him to the doc’s myself. Just got back from there.”
“Who called you?”
“Angela.” They all looked at each other. Bucky couldn’t help but say to Homer, “Was my pleasure to give Tully aid, seeing as how I had the free time.”
“Tully say how it happened?” Raleigh asked.
“No, just that he slipped. You know how he is when he’s in a bottle.”
“Wasn’t a bottle did it,” Raleigh told him. “Tully called me after it happened. I was gonna take him to the clinic myself until he said no. Told me to keep away. Said the grocery wasn’t safe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Joe spat a brown streak of tobacco juice onto the lot. “Go ask your wife,” he said.
“Guess I will.”
Bucky went on toward the front of the store. People came out of the grocery with whatever they’d had the chance to grab. Not just food and drink, but tubes of toothpaste, boxes of detergent, cans of dog food, mops, buckets. Anything Landis had to sell had taken on a lusty sheen of need in the town’s eyes. There came David and Belle trying to get inside and the mayor jogging from his truck. Everybody, friend. Everybody was there.
Bucky turned when he heard his name. John David Ramsay waved his arms and ran toward him.
“Get in there,” he yelled. “Go.”
“What you doing, John David
?”
He grabbed Bucky’s collar, pulling him along. “We got to get inside right now.”
Bucky tried planting his feet. It didn’t work. John David’s wiry, but he’s strong as an ox.
“Chessie heard there’s a run on Foster’s,” he said. “My fault.” He cursed. “This is all my fault.”
The doors loomed. Bucky could see Angela at her register. Her hands were moving over the counter in a blur, but it wasn’t fast enough. Her hair had gone limp and hung over her eyes. And those people. Lining the aisles and pressing in. The crowd outside was too much, but it was worse inside, and that’s when Bucky finally understood what John David had been trying to say.
“Something’s gonna happen.”
John David let go when Bucky’s feet started moving on their own. They ran side by side to the door. John David started tossing people aside, telling them to back away, make room for the constable. They squeezed through the doors at the same time. Angela looked up but couldn’t say a word for all her stress and fear. Her face said enough. Fingers flying over the buttons, trying to shove groceries into bags or letting them pile up wherever the conveyor belt on the counter spit them, ignoring the pleas and threats of those in line demanding that she hurry.
Some didn’t wait. Landis ran back and forth along the stretch of floor where the aisles began, begging people to be patient and get only what they needed. Those who avoided him—and there were many—ran straight for the doors with all their goods in tow. Kayann Foster demanded they turn and pay, screaming it in a panic. I don’t reckon Kayann had been told no more in her whole life than she had in the few hours she spent at the front of the grocery that afternoon. But those who got by Kayann now had to deal with John David. Let me tell you, folk were a whole lot more afraid of him than her. Mayor, Belle, and the Reverend had made it through by then. They were shouting, too, telling people to calm down and be orderly. Bucky didn’t know what to do and so joined in. Didn’t take him long to get the hang of it.