by Alex Bledsoe
“Well, if that don’t beat all,” Bourgeois said as he climbed out of the backhoe cab. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where the hell is it?”
Jack had spotted the disturbed dirt at the back of the grave, where earth had been pushed aside before falling back into a secondary hole. That had completed the puzzle: the giant pig had not been dead after all when they buried it, only stunned, wounded, and weakened. And after catching its breath, it dug itself out and escaped.
Bourgeois and two of his workers looked on in dumb surprise. “So you assholes buried it alive,” Darwin said.
Bourgeois looked up. “There’s no need for that sort of language.”
“And it got loose, despite your state-of-the-art technology,” Jack said, rattling the loose fence. “And two people died.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“You might want to get them lawyers you’re so fond of mentioning on the phone,” Darwin said. “I expect they’ve got some billable hours in their future.”
The smugness finally drained from Bourgeois’s face, which didn’t satisfy Jack nearly so much as putting his fist in the middle of it would have. But he’d settle for it.
* * *
“Oh my God, Jack, that’s awful,” Bliss said as she snuggled against him. They were in his small, sparse bedroom this time, and he’d just told her about the events at the hunting farm. When he’d opened his front door and seen her standing there, he found he suddenly wanted to do something other than talk. And so did she.
“Happens more and more,” he said. “Somebody puts up a fence, stocks their land with a bunch of game, and charges people to come in and hunt it. Some even guarantee results. It’s not illegal, but…”
“That’s not hunting,” Bliss said. “It’s just killing.”
“I agree.”
“What will happen to him?”
“Some sort of fine, unless they decide to charge him with being an accessory to those two kids’ deaths. But given how lawyered-up he claims to be, probably just a slap on the wrist.”
“I’m sorry. After all the work and time you’ve put in, I know that must be a disappointment.”
“More people get away than get caught—that’s in the nature of the job.”
“And yet you keep doing it.”
“Somebody has to.”
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
He turned and looked at her. She was so beautiful to him at the moment, all words stuck in his throat. He just wanted to look at her, to drink in her hair and her lips and the little crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes.
“At least,” she continued, “you and Alvin seemed to have reached a truce.”
“I understand him better now that I know … some of the things I know.” He kissed her and said, “I’m tired of shoptalk.”
“What would you like to talk about, then?”
“I’m really tired of talk, period.”
This time she kissed him, and pulled him on top of her. And they didn’t talk again for quite a while.
* * *
After Jack fell asleep, Bliss lay awake staring at the ceiling. The wild hog was dead; it turned out to be a mere animal after all. And yet, what had prompted it to dig itself out of its grave and come all the way to Half Pea Hollow in the first place? Instinct? Or the urgings of a certain six-fingered haint searching for a way to cause still more trouble for the people who’d celebrated his passing?
If Mandalay couldn’t say, then there was certainly no way for Bliss to tell. She hoped it was exactly as Jack said it was, and that the discovery of its carcass signaled the end of the story. But what if it wasn’t?
They could only wait. And watch.
* * *
Janet lay next to Ginny as well. They’d grown up this way, snuggling into each other’s bed since they were children. Janet blew softly on a harmonica as Ginny expertly rolled a joint.
“Are you blowing the blues for Piggly-Wiggly?” Ginny asked after she licked the paper.
“No,” Janet said, and tapped the harmonica on her palm. “I wrote his obituary for the Raven’s Caw. He can rest in peace now.”
“Then what is it?” She lit the joint, took a drag, then said, “You’re not still obsessing over that night, are you?”
“How can I not? The night winds whispered to me, Ginny. In an actual voice. And then I saw the world like Mandalay does.”
“That only happened because Mandalay was there.” She handed the joint to Janet.
“How do you know?”
“Has it happened again?”
Janet tucked the end of the joint into the far left hole and drew in her breath. It made a D note. She held it for a moment, then let it out, a faint C note accompanying the smoke. “Well … no.”
“There you go. You got a special gift that night, Janet, but it was a onetime thing. Accept it and move the fuck on.”
Janet turned to look at her with mock outrage. “‘Move the fuck on’? That’s your advice.”
“Best advice you’ll ever get,” Ginny said smugly.
Janet put the joint in the ashtray on her nightstand, then jumped on Ginny and began tickling her. They both screamed and laughed until they fell off the bed, and were still laughing when Janet’s mother stuck her head in to ask what all the racket was about, and why they were burning sage again.
* * *
Renny Procure—she’d had no trouble getting the marriage annulled—stood at the foot of Duncan’s grave. It was in the small Gowen plot, behind a weed-choked wrought iron fence at the end of a short trail behind his grandparents’ house.
She still wore a sling, although the physical therapy had restored almost all her movement in her arm. Her belly was now huge, and she was due in less than a month.
“This would’ve been our wedding day, if I hadn’t chickened out that night,” she said to the grave. “Right about now, I would’ve been lumbering my fat ass down the aisle. You’d have been waiting for me in a cheap rented tux, with my brother as your best man. Oh, wait. You’d already killed him by the time you proposed.”
She didn’t cry. She had no tears left. And even her rage had muted to a kind of constant noise in the back of her mind. She walked around the grave and kicked at the new marble headstone. “I just wanted you to know that your son will never even know your name. As soon as he’s born, I’m moving to Asheville. Yeah, I know all about what happens to Tufa who leave, but I’m willing to take that chance, for his sake. I don’t want him hearing stories about how funny and sweet and kind you were. I don’t want his friends telling him about how their parents said you died trying to save me, and him. Because none of that balances out what you did.”
She kicked the headstone harder, and winced at the pain in her foot. The wind began to blow through the trees, and her eyes scanned the shadows, looking for a human shape. But she saw nothing.
“By the way, I heard that Miss Azure saw your haint being chased by the ghost of that giant pig. I hope that’s true. I hope it’s true, and that the pig never catches you, just chases you until fucking doomsday. Because that’s what you deserve, you son of a bitch.”
She spat on the grave, then walked back down the trail to her car.
34
Janet walked off the stage, the rapturous applause continuing as she stepped out of the tent and into the backstage area. “Dang, honey, that was amazing,” the announcer said, having to shout it into her ear.
She signed autographs for the small crowd waiting for her, accepted the well wishes from the other storytellers, then got a fresh bottle of water from the cooler by the stage steps. As she guzzled it, she heard the announcer say, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for our final storyteller, Sheila Kay Adams.”
The applause was even louder. Janet smiled to herself; one of the things she liked about coming back for this festival was that it kept her humble.
A dozen people, spouses and friends, business managers and personal assistants, milled about in the outdo
or green room. The change from the humid, still tent to the relatively cool night was bracing and very welcome. Two small children slept curled up in canvas chairs, blankets tucked up to their chins. Beyond the open flaps, various vehicles parked, including the rental car that would shortly carry her to her parents’ house in Needsville.
She closed her eyes, grateful for the breeze. Beneath the starry sky, Ginny Vipperman sat in a canvas chair and looked up from her phone. “Sounds like she got a bigger response than you did.”
“This is her crowd. I’m just kibbutzing. And the announcer got the band’s name wrong again.”
“You’re the only one who still gets a weed up her ass about that.”
“It’s never been—”
“The Little Trouble Girls, yeah, I know,” Ginny finished. “You know, you should’ve taken my suggestion: Nine Hundred Ninety-nine Megabytes.”
“But then we’d never get a gig,” Janet said, and they both cracked up at their old inside joke.
“So you told the pig story?” Ginny asked.
“Couldn’t you hear?”
“I wasn’t paying attention.” She got up and stretched. “Besides, I’ve heard you tell that one plenty of times.”
“I should’ve let you tell it, then.”
“Your mother texted me. She wants to know when you’ll be home.”
“Probably not till dawn. I want to go jam in the café after everyone finishes.” After a pause she added, “Aren’t you going to ask me if I saw him?”
“I figure you must have. Where was he this time?”
“Where he always is. At the back of the tent. Just standing there, watching.”
“And you’re sure it’s not someone who just looked like him?”
“No, of course I’m not sure. I never am. But it’s a hell of a coincidence that every time I tell that story here, somebody who looks just like Duncan Gowen is in the audience.”
“I thought his haint was still being chased around Half Pea Hollow by the ghost of that giant hog.”
“Maybe he gets time off for good behavior.”
“Does it bother you?”
“No. Not exactly. I just wish…”
“What?”
“Every time I start telling that story, I wish that he’d made a different decision that day. That he’d shot the hog, or warned Adam, or just not even gone hunting in the first place.”
“He could’ve made a worse choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“He could’ve shot Adam Procure right in the head.”
Janet smiled, but she was too tired to laugh. “Murder, suicide, dismemberment, or coming back from the dead.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s how you know if it’s a love song.”
“In these mountains, that’s a fact,” Ginny agreed.
Janet looked up. The sky above Jonesborough was clear, and the air, while warm, moved with just enough breeze to be pleasant. The urge to leap into that sky, spread wings like glass, and ride the wind beneath the stars was strong, as it was whenever she came home. But for this night, she was grounded by choice, and she’d have to wait for another time.
SONGS LIST
All song lyrics are original, except the ones listed below.
CHAPTER 1
“Somebody’s Tall and Handsome,” composed by “J.R.M.” in 1884, https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1884.03529.
“Handsome Mary, the Lily of the West,” traditional Irish folk song, later Americanized, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_of_the_West.
CHAPTER 3
“Old Bangum,” traditional, https://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/songinformation.aspx?ID=1499.
CHAPTER 4
“The Nightingale (The Soldier and the Lady),” traditional, extant copies as early as 1682, http://www.stolaf.edu/people/hend/songs/Nightingale.html.
CHAPTER 6
“The Fairy Lullaby,” found in Seventy Scottish Songs by Helen Hopekirk, first published, 1905.
CHAPTER 8
“The Dead Brother’s Song,” composed in Asia Minor during the ninth century, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Brother%27s_Song.
CHAPTER 20
“Young Orphy,” anonymous retelling of the Orpheus legend, found in the Auchinleck manuscript from the fourteenth century, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Orfeo.
CHAPTER 23
“The Two Sisters,” number 10 of the Child Ballads, collected in the nineteenth century by Francis James Child.
CHAPTER 29
“Against the Black,” written by Jen Cass and Eric Janetsky, © 2015, used by permission.
BOOKS BY ALEX BLEDSOE
Blood Groove
The Girls with Games of Blood
The Sword-Edged Blonde
Burn Me Deadly
Dark Jenny
Wake of the Bloody Angel
He Drank, and Saw the Spider
The Hum and the Shiver
Wisp of a Thing
Long Black Curl
Chapel of Ease
Gather Her Round
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEX BLEDSOE grew up in West Tennessee, but now lives in Wisconsin. He is the acclaimed author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels (The Sword-Edged Blonde; Burn Me Deadly; Dark Jenny; Wake of the Bloody Angel; He Drank, and Saw the Spider), the Tufa series (The Hum and the Shiver; Wisp of a Thing; Long Black Curl; Chapel of Ease), and the Memphis Vampires (Blood Groove; The Girls with Games of Blood). You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Special Thanks
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Songs List
Books by Alex Bledsoe
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GATHER HER ROUND
Copyright © 2017 Alex Bledsoe
All rights reserved.
Cover photographs by Stephen Carroll/Trevillion Images (figures) and Danita Delimont/Alamy Stock Photo (mountains)
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First Edition: March 2017