by Alex Bledsoe
Stoney watched his cousin Dorcas back up his huge Dodge Ram pickup to the grave. In the bed was a chair-sized rock with an inscription carved on it.
Mandalay, who wasn’t quite tall enough to see into the bed, said, “What does it say?”
“Something I reckon we can all agree on,” Stoney said.
Bliss looked at the stone and snorted. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”
Mandalay climbed onto the bumper and looked over the tailgate. The inscription read:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF A MAN WHO DIED
NOBODY MOURNED, NOBODY CRIED
HOW HE LIVED, HOW HE FARED
NOBODY KNOWS, NOBODY CARES
The wind picked up, blowing cold and sharp across the mountaintop. Mandalay looked at the clouds now gathering overhead.
“More snow’s coming,” she said. “Let’s get him in the ground.”
“I’ll take you home,” Bliss said. “I need to go clean up the fire station, anyway.”
The two women left, leaving the men to attend to the grave. A half hour later, they’d gotten it halfway filled when Marshall stopped, pointed to a column of smoke rising in the distance, and said, “Hey, what’s that?”
14
After dropping Mandalay off at her family’s trailer, Bliss finished cleaning up the fire station, eliminating all traces of the events of the last days. No one would ever know that a body had been here. It was highly unlikely that any law enforcement types would come by, but it paid to be careful. She didn’t want to have to disinter Rockhouse because some bureaucrat got hung up on missing paperwork.
She poured herself a cup of coffee, stirred in the creamer, and watched the pattern of the swirl. Some people could tell the future by these things, but not her.
The front door burst open and Duncan McCoy entered. Without taking off his boots, he said, “Bliss, your house is on fire.”
It took a moment for the words to register. “What?”
By then Duncan had already pulled on his turnout coat. “We tried to call you, but you didn’t answer. Everyone’s heading up here to get the fire engine, but…” He paused before adding, “you better be prepared. I don’t think there’s much we can do.”
Bliss stared at him, unable even to find words. She pulled out her phone; sure enough, it was dead, the charge completely gone.
There was just no way her house, the house that had been in the Overbay family for generations, the house that protected one of the Tufa’s most precious artifacts, could just burn down. Not unless—
“Bo-Kate,” she said.
But before she could say more, other men rushed into the station and donned their firefighting gear.
* * *
The column of deep gray smoke rose into the clear sky. Cloud County’s lone fire truck idled in the circular drive, its intake hoses trailing down to the little lake, where a hole had been chopped in the ice along the edge. By the time the volunteer force got ready to aggressively battle the flames, though, the house was destroyed.
Bliss stared at the remains with the same numb shock she felt when, as an EMT, she arrived at a fatal accident and realized she knew the victim. There was no need for her skills, at least; no one was in the house when it burned down. No one, that is, but her family’s ghosts, and they were immune from fire, if not loss.
Deacon Hyatt came over to her and took off his fireman’s helmet. He looked exhausted; he’d been up all night working on Rockhouse’s coffin and then had rushed to the fire station with the rest of the volunteer force. His face was stained from sweat and smoke. “Ain’t nothing we can do, Bliss,” he said sadly.
She nodded. “I understand. Is there … Can you tell where it started?”
“It looks like all over the downstairs, honestly.”
“Like it was deliberately set?”
He nodded.
“So it was arson.”
“Well, you knew that, anyway, didn’t you? I mean, it had to be, right?”
“Yeah.”
He pulled off one heavy glove and put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m real sorry, Bliss.”
She patted his hand. “Thank you, Deacon. Tell me, did it spread into the cellar?”
“Can’t tell until we get the hot spots out. But…” He trailed off, leaving unspoken what they both thought. The slightest spark would’ve sent the tapestry up in an instant. He turned and went to rejoin the others.
She leaned against the fender of her truck. What Bo-Kate had done to Rockhouse was awful, but it was hard not to think the old bastard deserved it. That, she knew, would be the general consensus among the Tufa on both sides.
But this …
This was more than just burning down someone’s house. If that bitch wanted a war …
The tapestry in her cellar was older than this country, older than the mountains around them. It was a touchstone of the Tufa’s shared collective history, and had been in the Overbays’ charge since … well, since the night winds first blew them here. If Bo-Kate Wisby had destroyed it, then she’d gone a long way toward destroying the Tufa, because without these common symbols to bind them, they would dissipate and fade even more than they already had.
Bliss stood alone in the center of the storm of activity, her rage making a bubble around her that no one else dared to penetrate. She balled her hands into fists. It had been barely two days; what would Bo-Kate do by the end of the week?
* * *
Bo-Kate sat on the picnic table at the scenic overlook and watched the column of smoke rise over the valley. She sipped from a beer and felt a level of contentment she’d never thought she’d again experience. It wasn’t quite like riding on the night winds, but it was close.
She looked over at Nigel, who stood by the SUV, arms folded. He was a delicious bit of man, all right: tall, muscular, handsome in a lean way, and sophisticated. He knew books, music, and art; he was a loyal employee and a ferocious lover. It would be a shame when she had to kill him, but she knew before she started that there would come a point when he would stop being useful.
She just didn’t think it would be so soon.
He joined her on the table. “What now?” he asked morosely.
“Oh, come on, Nigel, I didn’t murder anybody,” she said. “I just burned down an empty house.”
Nigel said nothing, but he remembered the particular way some strange knicknacks had been arranged on a shelf, around the photograph of a young couple dressed as people did in the ’60s. It was a little family shrine, and it spoke of love, and kindness, and the type of family who called each other on birthdays and got together for holidays. He’d always envied families like that, and for some reason the idea that he’d helped injure their sense of security made him feel especially bad.
“You still haven’t told me,” he said, “what you were looking for?”
“A tapestry. Something woven in the old country and brought over when the Tufa first came here.”
“And why is it important?”
“It’s a symbol, that’s why. If I’m going to unite the Tufa under my hand, then the old symbols have to go.”
He nodded. They watched for a bit longer as the smoke column grew thinner and more wispy against the dimming sky. At last she climbed down, brushed off the seat of her jeans, and said, “Okay, back to the salt mines. We have to go find a young woman named Carolanne Pollard.”
“And shall we kill her, then?”
She laughed. “No, she’s always been resentful of the status quo, and she’s a smart, resourceful girl. I want to recruit her.”
Nigel nodded, but she could sense by his tightly wound silence that his usefulness really might come to an end even sooner than she thought. She hoped she’d get one more night out of him, but if he had to go, then he had to. Sacrifice was necessary for every worthwhile endeavor. Besides, there were plenty of handsome young men among the Tufa, and soon she would have her pick of them.
* * *
Carolanne Pollard sat looking at her laptop screen. It was
the latest exam for her online college course, and it made her head hurt. A lot of things in her major came naturally to her: behavioral psychology, primate biology, even history. But calculus was like learning a language that had no words in common with her own. Like Finnish, she thought, which had only the word “sauna” in common with English.
Her house was on a winding dirt road up on Walden Mountain, one of the smallest peaks in Cloud County. In fact, it was bisected over the top by a row of power lines, like a metal mohawk across the top of a skull. But the leases for those towers paid for her college, so she learned to choke down the sense of violation she felt every time she saw them.
Besides, soon she’d be out of here. Once she got her undergraduate degree, she would begin to look for master’s and Ph.D. programs. She knew that Tufas who left Cloud County often met with disaster, but that was only if they meant to never come back. She had every intention of coming back, triumphantly, as a goddamned full-fledged symphony conductor.
That’d show those damned First Daughters.
She was a firstborn daughter. But because she wasn’t also a pureblood Tufa, they’d turned up their collective noses at her. That rejection had fueled her determination, but it also broke her heart. It meant she’d never really belong.
A knock at the door made her jump. It was nearly dark, and there was snow everywhere. Her father and brother had run out to help fight a fire, her baby sister was spending the night with a friend, and her mother was at her sewing circle. Who would brave this weather just to come see her?
She opened it to see a Tufa woman in her thirties and a handsome black man standing at the bottom of the steps. She did not know either of them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m Bo-Kate Wisby, and this is Nigel Hawtrey,” the woman said. “You’re Carolanne, right?”
“Yeah,” she said guardedly. Her father kept a loaded shotgun beside the door, and she placed her unseen hand on the barrel. “If you’re selling something, you’re wasting your time. My folks ain’t home, and I’m in college, so I’m broke.”
“No, we’re not selling anything. I want to talk to you about something.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I’m nobody.”
“That can change.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“The First Daughters.”
Carolanne’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I ain’t one of them.”
“I know. They wouldn’t let you in, despite you learning so much of their ways.”
Carolanne said skeptically, “Now, how would you know that?”
“Does it matter? Look, can we come in? It’s cold out here.”
“You can, but not him. My mama would have a conniption if she knew I let a colored man in the house.”
The black man raised one eyebrow. Bo-Kate turned to him and said, “Wait in the truck, Nigel. This won’t take long.”
“As you wish, my dear,” he said, and trudged through the snow back to the vehicle.
Bo-Kate took off her boots by the door and hung her coat on an empty hook. The old house was smaller than the Wisby farm, and considerably more modern. A laptop, thick textbooks, and piles of paper were scattered on the kitchen table, while a fifty-inch TV dominated the living room. “Your parents aren’t home?”
“No.” Then she added quickly, “But they’ll be back any minute.”
“You don’t have to be afraid of me, Carolanne. I’m not going to hurt you. I want to offer you something.”
“What’s that?”
“Pretty soon, everything’s going to change. The Tufa are going to stop being split, and come together under one leader.”
“Mandalay Harris?”
Bo-Kate smiled. “Me.”
“And who are you?”
“I’m the woman who’s already taken Rockhouse Hicks permanently out of the equation. And I’ll do the same to that Harris girl.”
“That still doesn’t tell me who you are.”
“I’m what this backwards-ass county needs. I’ll bring businesses and money and the fucking modern world here. We won’t be folktales and myths anymore, we’ll be out there on the radio and downloads where we belong. I know the music industry like I know the sound of my own voice, and it’s time for us to take it back from the Simon Cowells of the world.”
Carolanne considered this. “Okay,” she said, still guarded, “so what do you want from me?”
“Information, sweetie. I haven’t been here in a long time, and I need to know who’s doing what to who.”
Carolanne smiled. “Gossip? You want gossip?”
Bo-Kate grinned back. “I want the most valuable thing in the world, honey: secrets. Bring the dish.”
15
More snow fell that night, and the next day was another no-school day. Mandalay had to learn about it from the radio in her father’s truck, since the snow and ice had snapped the power and phone lines somewhere, and all the family’s cell phones had gone dead. Luckily they heated with a woodstove, so they stayed warm.
She had a gnawing sense that something was wrong, but couldn’t put her finger on the source. She was also incredibly, inexplicably preoccupied.
She stood in the door in just her long T-shirt despite the cold wind and watched her parents depart in her father’s big truck. Alone, she padded the length of the house and retrieved her guitar. Once again, the first song that came to her was Alice Peacock’s “Paranoid.” As she played the last chord, the power came back on, startling her.
She reset all the clocks, then waited until 9 A.M., the unofficial time it was okay to call someone for a nonemergency reason. Then she dialed the number for Luke’s house.
On the third ring, he answered it himself. “Hello?”
“Hey, Luke,” she said with false casualness. It amazed her that despite the accumulated Tufa wisdom and experience rattling around in her head, she could still be nervous talking to a boy. “It’s Mandalay. Mandalay Harris. You know, from the other night.”
“Yeah.”
“Watching it snow?”
“Nah, eating breakfast.”
“I should do that. Our power was out until about twenty minutes ago. Your parents working?”
“Yeah.”
“Mine, too. You think you can make it down to the Pair-A-Dice around lunchtime?”
There was a long pause. “Why?”
“Thought you might bring your guitar and we could play a little.”
Another long pause. “Are you serious?”
“Well, I can’t invite you to my house, and you can’t invite me to yours, can you?”
“Reckon not.”
“So?”
She heard other voices behind him, no doubt his brothers and sisters. They didn’t seem to have noticed he was on the phone, or have any ideas whom he was talking to.
“I might can catch a ride with my uncle Andy,” he said. “He usually heads to town about then.”
A warm thrill ran up her neck and cheeks. “Well, I’ll be there anyway. Maybe I’ll see you.”
“Maybe you will.”
She hung up, threw herself on the couch, and stared up at the ceiling. Memories and sensations of so many Tufa women attracted to so many men filled her, things she could neither comprehend nor understand yet as a twelve-year-old girl. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth against it. I am Mandalay Harris, not any of you, she said to the ghosts trying to command her attention. You’ve had your fun. This is all about me.
At that moment, the house phone rang, her cell phone beeped with a text, and her laptop chimed to announce she had e-mail. All the messages concerned the fire at Bliss Overbay’s the previous evening.
* * *
Tain Wisby looked out at the Hang Dog Diner’s empty tables. The snow had effectively killed their business this morning, with men concentrating on getting to work, and women stuck at home with children out of school. Only three people needed her attention, all eld
erly retirees with nowhere else to go. They barely even noticed her in her scandalously tight waitress uniform, with her legs bare and top button undone. That indifference annoyed her more than the weather.
The Hang Dog was located on Highway 7 just past the interstate, outside Cloud County. There weren’t many non-agricultural jobs in the county itself, so the non-farming Tufa had to look a bit afield for gainful employment. Once again Tain wished she’d kept her pants on that night at the convenience store, when her boss had discovered her and Shelby Renfro doing the deed in his office. Now Lassa Gwinn had her old job, and seemed determined to keep it until she was too big to get through the doors, like the legendary moonshiner Great Kate Gwinn.
“Little top-off here, Tain?” one of the old men said, and raised his cup in her direction.
She picked up the carafe and poured with a sigh of boredom. “Here you go, Mr. Lytle.”
“Not too exciting this morning, is it?” he said as he sipped.
“It sure ain’t,” Tain agreed.
“If I was forty years younger, I might show you something a little exciting,” he said with a grin and a wink.
“If you were forty years younger, Mr. Lytle, I’d sure enough let you.” And she meant it.
Headlights swept through the gloom as a truck pulled into the lot. She didn’t recognize the figure that got out, but her brief excitement was diminished when she saw white hair above the face half-hidden in a scarf. Another geezer, she thought to herself. Yay.
When he came in the door, she recognized him. “Snowy Rainfield,” she said, genuinely pleased to see him. She knew he worked construction, and in this weather he couldn’t be on his way to a job. “What brings you out on a day like this?”
“If I say it’s to see you, will that get me a slap or a kiss?” he said as he took off his coat and sat at the counter.