by Alex Bledsoe
Byron stood, awkwardly because of his leg. “Pleasure to meet you, miss. You live near here?”
“Not too far off.”
He seemed to struggle with his thoughts. “Listen, I … my friends and I were in an accident up the hill. I could really use some help getting in touch with the police.”
Eli stood, stretched, and twisted until his back popped. “You just rest that bad leg, youngster. Marshall said he’d call the police when he got home and send ’em up here at first light. You stay here so you can lead ’em back up to the crash.”
Byron seemed about to say something, but then thought better of it. He nodded and sat back down, his bad leg stretched out before him.
Eli shuffled over to Mandalay and, hidden from the other two, made a simple hand gesture of respect. Mandalay nodded. “Be back soon, gentlemen,” he said, and followed the girl out into the darkness.
Byron watched them disappear, then turned to Fiddlin’ John. “Seem strange to you that a little girl’s out running around the mountains all by herself in the middle of the night?”
Carson shrugged. “People round here have their own ways, and the kids have to pull their weight pretty early.”
“Yeah,” Byron said, unable to shake the gnawing sense that something was wrong. Then the haze enveloped him again; he smiled and reached for his guitar. “Well, we might as well pick a few while we wait, what do you say?”
“Sounds like the right thing to me,” John said, and tucked his fiddle under his chin.
* * *
When they were far enough away they wouldn’t be heard, Eli asked, “So who’s passed away?”
“Rockhouse Hicks,” Mandalay said.
The sin eater stared at her. “Are you serious?”
Mandalay looked back at him. Her eyes shone the way an animal’s might. “You really think I’d make that up?”
“Well … how did he die?”
“Of a broken heart.” She did not smile when she said it.
“Where is he?”
“The fire station. Bliss Overbay’s there with him. Can you make it?”
“Course. Made it a lot further in a lot worse weather.”
“Then I’ll head home.” She turned, then stopped. She looked back with the seriousness of her office. “Do you know who that is sitting with you?”
“Fiddlin’ John Carson. Don’t worry, he’ll go back where he belongs.”
“Not him. The other one.”
“Beats me. He just showed up. He was on a plane that crashed.”
“The plane crash that killed Tarvell Moon,” she said with sudden realization. Mandalay looked back up the slope, past the glow of the fire, and into the darkness where the plane’s wreckage remained. Tarvell Moon had been a young Tufa man desperate to learn to ride the night wind, but never quite able to manage it. Then, one night, he leaped into the sky, unfolded his wings, and began to dance. In his giddiness, he flew acrobatically around a small airplane; unfortunately, due to his inexperience, he flew right into the propellers. He was killed, and the plane crashed.
Like the song said, it was “the night the music flew away.”
“He should be dead,” Mandalay said.
“Tarvell? He is.”
Eli had no idea who the big man was, and that, for the moment, was a good thing. It gave Mandalay time to try to figure out why no one else knew about it. “All right, Eli. And thank you for seeing to Rockhouse.” She made a hand gesture of her own, one of respect and appreciation for the sin eater’s dedication.
He nodded formally, doffed his top hat, and bowed. “It’s my job.”
* * *
Mandalay worked her way down and emerged from the woods into her own backyard. She slipped into the house and went to her bedroom without waking her father or Leshell, but she did not sleep. Instead she lay awake listening for the night wind, which for one of the few times in her life, was absolutely silent.
That should have dominated her thoughts. Or the presence of a dead man where he shouldn’t be. Or the return of Bo-Kate Wisby. But instead, the kind look in Luke Somerville’s eyes kept coming back to her.
Luke was one of Rockhouse’s people. Not one of hers. This was a line that could never be crossed without great damage being done. Only at the Pair-A-Dice roadhouse, neutral territory, could the two sides meet and socialize.
She made a decision then. But she’d have to wait until morning to implement it. And first she had to see Rockhouse into the ground.
12
A firm knock at the fire station’s back door awakened Bliss. She looked at the clock: 12:30 A.M. She’d curled up on a cot beneath one of the heavy blankets used for shock victims, and her back and legs were stiff. “Just a minute,” she called, her hazy mind not even dwelling on who it might be.
She opened the door. A lone stooped figure stood in the porch light’s glare, and she stepped back until her brain cleared enough for her to recognize him. His odor was thick and musty, like a closet full of abandoned clothes.
“Hello, Bliss Overbay,” Eli the Sin Eater said. “Sorry it took me so long to get here. Turned out to be a hell of a walk in the snow.”
“Come in,” she said. He entered, stomped his feet on the mat to dislodge the snow, then stood aside so she could close the door. He was shorter than her, and probably skinnier under his many layers of rags.
“So the story little missy told me is true?” he asked. “Rockhouse is dead?”
“As dead as he can be.”
He smiled. His mustache was long and ragged, and the ends trailed down past his stubbled chin. “Well, with you Tufa, that don’t always mean much. Let me see him.”
She led him into the room where Rockhouse’s body waited. He lay in state on a wooden door across two sawhorses. Tradition called it a “cooling board,” used to keep the corpse from contorting with rigor mortis.
A heavy rag soaked in camphor oil lay on Rockhouse’s face; it would keep the flesh a normal color, at least long enough to get the body in the ground. Beneath that, his eyes were held shut by silver coins that, if an expert ever saw them, would confound him or her with their antiquity. They were one of the only concessions to the deceased’s former status.
Eli put a hand on the old man’s chest to check for breathing or heartbeat. Much like hunters who administered an extra head shot even after the big game had been felled, Eli believed in always paying the insurance. Satisfied, he said, “What have you got for me?”
Bliss gestured to the floor under the table. A plate of biscuits and a whiskey jug rested there.
“It’s what I had to work with,” she said with a shrug.
The sin eater smiled. He picked up a biscuit, sniffed it, then touched his tongue to it. Satisfied, he took a bite. “It’s fine.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “I need to pee and brush my teeth.”
* * *
When they were alone, Eli paced three times counterclockwise around the corpse. He watched for the slightest movement, for any indication that Rockhouse was either faking or not entirely dead. He saw nothing. And more important, he felt nothing.
“Supposed to wait three days to bury you, old man,” Eli said to the corpse. “Make sure your spirit ain’t hoverin’ around to do mischief. But I reckon everyone knows exactly where your spirit is, don’t they?”
The “sin eater” was the work-around for the Judeo-Christian concept of judgment. He ameliorated the sins of the recently deceased before he or she traveled on to whatever awaited them. The practice was ancient, and those with the gift of it were both respected and feared. Eli’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all been sin eaters; one of Eli’s sons would someday hear the call and join his father to learn the skill.
The process was simple. Food was left on or near the dead for a time, during which it absorbed a lifetime of misdeeds, untruths, and deliberate wrongdoing. The gift allowed the sin eater to consume the evil with the food, taking it into himself and then dispersing its energy
harmlessly.
Now Eli nibbled slowly on the most toxic, sin-loaded biscuit he’d ever eaten. And he had a whole plate of them to get through before daylight.
“Goddamn, Rockhouse,” Eli said through the mouthful. “I knew we’d have to finish up someday, but I never imagined I’d be sitting here eating your sins. I’m already queasy, and I ain’t finished one biscuit yet.”
He choked down the last few dry bites and took a swig from the whiskey jug. “You did some terrible things in your life, Rockhouse, but I’ll give you one thing: You held your people together. Even when Radella split to lead her own band, you made sure she stayed close, so you were all in the same valley. Don’t know what the Tufa’d be now if you hadn’t done that.” He chuckled. “Course, shame you had to do it by being such a goddamned asshole. Never heard that saying about honey and vinegar, I reckon, did you?”
He finished the second biscuit and started on the third. “And what you did to your sister, then your daughter and her husband, that’s just plain terrible. You crossed a bunch of lines with that, you know. They all respected you until then; yeah, they were scared of you, but that was only part of it. After that, they just kinda despised you.”
He drank some more whiskey, and accidentally choked himself. He bent over and coughed until he gagged, but didn’t throw up what he’d eaten. That was something he never wanted to do, because he then faced a terrible dilemma—eat only what was left on the plate, and leave some sins unleavened, or consume his own vomit like some coonhound. He sat back and took several deep breaths until the nausea passed.
“Well, anyway, old man, your time is done. I hope you end up back home, and that your Queen is in a forgiving mood. Yeah, that’s right—I hope she lets you back in. Not even you deserve to be left in a rotting corpse for all eternity.”
He took another bite, then smiled. “Then again … if anyone did deserve it, it’s you.”
* * *
Bliss came in to check on him shortly before sunrise. She looked exhausted, and the day was only going to get worse. “How’s it going?” she asked.
He shrugged. “It’s going. Some things you can’t rush.”
“Ever had one as bad as this?”
He smiled. “You’d like me to say no, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s hard for me to imagine worse.”
He held up one of the biscuits. “This old man turned mean out of shame. He tried to show off once, and failed, and got all the Tufa sent over here. His pride choked him to death, and the only way he could deal with it was to be mean.”
“You make it sound like I should feel sorry for him.”
“Your choice. But I’ve known lots of folks who were mean just because it was in their nature. Nothing bad ever happened to turn ’em that way, they just was. If you ask me, that’s a lot worse than turning mean.”
“Is that why it’s taking so long?”
“Well, he did turn mean a long time ago. He’s had more time than most to pile stuff up.”
* * *
When the day dawned, Mandalay felt the time-immemorial childhood thrill of hearing Cloud County Consolidated School District mentioned in the closed list on the radio. A mass text sent to her stepmother’s phone by the principal confirmed this. A snow day also meant that everyone could attend Rockhouse’s funeral that afternoon. She quickly showered and dressed, then departed in the way only a Tufa can for the firehouse. She had a long day ahead and was working on far too little sleep.
The skies cleared shortly after sunrise, about the time Marshall Goins and Deacon Hyatt arrived at the fire station with Rockhouse’s coffin. It was made from a single pine log, cut in half lengthwise and then hollowed out. It rested in the bed of Deacon’s truck, since this wasn’t the end of its journey.
The fire station’s bell rang pure and loud in the cold air as Deacon backed into the driveway. The peal would travel to every ear that needed to hear it. Tradition held that it should toll once for each year of the dead person’s life, but in the case of Rockhouse, it would be tolling for a week. So it was just going until the whole Tufa community knew of it.
“Who’s ringing the bell?” Deacon asked as Bliss came out to greet them. He yawned and shook his head to wake up. He’d gotten the call about Rockhouse just after he went to bed, and preparing the coffin had taken most of the night.
“Mandalay,” Bliss said. “She wanted to.” She peered into the truck bed. “Is that it?”
“Hard to find a tree trunk straight enough and long enough,” Marshall said to Bliss. “Every one we dug out of the snow was either rotten or too twisted. Almost like the whole damn woods wanted nothing to do with him.”
“Can you blame them?” Bliss muttered, then instantly regretted it. Rockhouse could no longer defend himself; picking on him now was no different from the way he’d treated people in his life.
“Did Eli come see him?” Deacon asked.
“Just finishing up,” Bliss said.
“I don’t envy him his job today,” Deacon said wryly.
“I never do,” Marshall said.
Eli emerged, looking slightly nauseated. He brushed dust from his hat and put it back on, then burped loudly and tapped his chest with his fist. “Well, he’s as ready as I can make him.”
“Thanks, Eli,” Bliss said, and made a hand gesture of respect.
He responded with a similar gesture for her. “Glad to do it, Bliss. Wait—that’s not true. I hated every damn minute of it.” He chuckled. “But we do our jobs even when we don’t want to, don’t we? That’s how we know we’re all growed up, right?”
“Right, I reckon.”
He doffed his top hat to Marshall and Deacon, then turned toward the woods. He shuffled through the snow, humming to himself, and disappeared among the trees.
“By the way,” Bliss said to the two men, “I need someone to take care of that.” She pointed to a bucket beside the door.
“What is it?” Deacon asked guardedly.
“Rockhouse’s blood. I drained it out of him.”
Marshall and Deacon exchanged a look. Somehow, the death of Rockhouse had all felt rather abstract until now, as if its reality were a distant thing that didn’t really affect them. But there was no distance, physical or metaphorical, from that bucket of blood.
Deacon said, “What do you want done with it?”
“Find somewhere to pour it out. Just make sure you do it downhill from Emania Knob. Wouldn’t want him able to draw it back, would we?”
“You really think he could do that?” Marshall asked.
“I think anything he’s able to do shouldn’t surprise us. Including coming back from the dead. That’s why I want to make it as hard as possible for him.”
Marshall looked at the thick crimson liquid in the bucket. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” he muttered, and picked it up by the handle. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll walk it down the hill and pour it somewhere safe.”
“Sing over it, too,” Bliss added. “Sing ‘Edward, Edward.’”
That song, Marshall knew, was about a man who murders his own younger brother and has to leave his family, including his children. “This ain’t exactly a tragedy.”
“It is to Rockhouse. And the more we ease his passage, the safer we’ll all be.”
Marshall couldn’t argue with that. He set out down the road, avoiding the slick spots of ice.
Deacon said, “What can I do?”
“Go over to Emania Knob and light a fire to melt the ground enough to dig the grave,” Bliss said. “Then come back so we can load up the body.”
“Will do.” He got back in the truck and drove off, leaving Bliss with only the tolling bell for company.
* * *
Shortly after the bell stopped ringing, the Gwinns arrived.
Holbert Gwinn, tall and skinny, with skin the consistency of old leather, wore a button-down shirt and dress khakis cinched at his waist. His wife Murlo, 250 pounds and almost as wide as she was
tall, wore her only dress, which was old and permanently stained. The half-dozen children that piled out of the old truck’s bed, including the adults like Tiffany and Mercantile, were dressed in what passed for their best clothes. They were mirror images of their parents, the girls large and round and the boys thin as pipe cleaners. Pieces of black cloth covered both side-view mirrors and the rearview mirror in the cab, mountain tradition that usually didn’t involve vehicles. But since they were here to visit Rockhouse, it was best to take no chances.
Holbert made a gesture of respect, and Bliss reciprocated. Tiffany glowered at her, hateful because of their shared history of conflict, but Murlo smacked the girl on the back of the head.
Holbert held up an envelope with a black border. It was the funeral announcement that he, and many others, had found slipped under their door this morning as a reinforcement of the ringing bell. That way, no one could claim they didn’t know about it. “What time’s the old man going into the ground?”
“This afternoon at three. Up on Emania Knob.”
“Should we go there now, then?”
“Might be best. Marshall Goins is up there lighting a fire to melt the ground.”
“I reckon I can take some wood for that, then.”
“Much appreciated.”
“Oh, come on,” one of the skinny sons, Phelan, said. “We got to stay in these monkey suits all day?”
Hobart snapped around. “You do if you want to see the sunrise tomorrow, you disrespectful little shit.”
“For Rockhouse? He was a son of a bitch!”
Tiffany slapped the boy so hard, he spun around and fell to the ground.
“Ow!” Phelan cried in pain and anger. “Goddamn it, Tiffany!”
“You watch your mouth,” she said as she stood over him. “Uncle Rockhouse was our leader, and we’ll show him respect.”
“Tiffany,” Bliss said quietly. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to calm the big woman, although it might be the first time Bliss had ever seen her in a dress. “Phelan can feel however he wants.”
“Yeah, well, he best keep his feelings to himself,” Tiffany said, then folded her arms across her chest.
“That ol’ Rockhouse was the only man I ever saw who could strut sitting down,” Hobart said. “We’ll be going. Back in the truck, y’all.”