Dark River Road

by Virginia Brown

  So he sat there, waiting, watching the clock, caught between dread and anger and his own fear, while the doctors tended to Mama. How long could it take to stitch up her head? It’d never taken them so long with him, but maybe they had to do a lot more. There had just been so much blood . . .

  Beside him, Dempsey stirred, made some kind of sound like a moan or a prayer, and he glanced at him before he saw that he was looking down the hallway. Chantry turned as one of the doctors came into the waiting room and shut the door, blood on his white coat, a look on his face that made the world tilt.

  “Lord Jesus,” Dempsey whispered even before the doctor shook his head and said he was sorry.

  “There was nothing we could do. The injury was too severe. Massive head trauma. She’s gone.”

  Somehow Chantry was standing up but he didn’t remember doing it, and he had the doctor by the front of his coat, a fist tangled in the cotton, shoving him backward and up against the ugly green tiles. People were grabbing at him, trying to get him to turn loose but he kept shaking him, telling him so fiercely to take it back that it should have changed it all. It should have but it didn’t. He couldn’t make him take it back, couldn’t make it not be true.

  It was Dempsey who finally pried his hands loose from the doctor, half-dragging him away while he said things in his ear, words that made no sense. “Chantry boy, your mama wouldn’t want this, wouldn’t want you to take on so. Please son, listen to me, listen to ole Dempsey. I ain’t never lied to you, have I? Have I? This won’t bring her back. Ain’t nothin’ you can do that will bring her back and you got to let go. I know it don’t make no sense, a terrible accident like this, but sometimes there just ain’t nothin’ we can do when it happens.”

  Panting, each breath a harsh sound like a sob even though his eyes were dry, he looked past Dempsey to where Rainey stood as if frozen to the spot, staring at him with white-rimmed eyes like pale glass marbles. Dempsey had caught him around the middle and held him in his arms, keeping him from moving, his flannel shirt rough against Chantry’s bare skin. He could feel the wiry strength in the old man’s arms, hear the rough pain in his voice, the pleas for understanding, but it just couldn’t get past the wildness in him, the pain so strong and fierce and hot he didn’t think he’d survive it.

  One thought kept repeating over and over in his head: It was no accident.

  Maybe he said it out loud. Rainey started toward him, mouth flattening into a straight line like he was mad but it wasn’t anger that made his eyes so wide and those white lines go deep on each side of his mouth.

  “Let me talk to him,” Rainey said, and sounded hoarse as if he’d been shouting.

  Dempsey’s arms tightened. “This probably ain’t the best time.”

  Rainey ignored him. “He’ll talk to me,” he said, eyes boring into Chantry so hard and deep that somehow that got through when so little else had. He was scared shitless, and Chantry knew it. He recognized it. And he knew why.

  “Fuck you,” he got out, and heard one of the nurses who’d rushed to the doctor’s side call him a little savage before someone shushed her. He narrowed his eyes at Rainey.

  “Chantry—you know we gotta talk.”

  Talk, when it hurt to even breathe . . . after a minute, he jerked his head. “Fine.”

  Dempsey let go of him. “You sure, son?”

  “Yeah. It’s okay.” He looked at Rainey. “I’ll hear him out.”

  They went into the chapel just off the waiting room, a carpeted room with an altar at the front, a cross on the wall, and Bibles on the two tables set at each end of a long sofa. Soft lights burned, and a plastic plant gathered dust. Rainey shut the door and looked at him.

  “You know I’d never hurt your mama on purpose. It was an accident.”

  “You shoved her.” He said it flatly. “You meant to do it.”

  Rainey’s face went white. “Shove her, maybe, but never hurt her. I’d never hurt her, not like that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Rainey got a cunning look in his eyes. “All right. Go ahead and tell the cops that. See what happens when you do. You ain’t got no mama now, no daddy. Just me.”

  “Is that supposed to change my mind?”

  “Look at it this way. If I go to jail, you and Mikey go to foster care. That dog? He’ll most like end up at the pound.”

  Foster care. Jesus. A fleeting image of Mikey in some stranger’s home flashed in front of him.

  “Yeah,” Rainey said, sensing weakness, “they’ll split you two up, send you one way and him another, and then who’s gonna look out for him? How’s he ever gonna get his legs fixed like your mama wanted?”

  Fiercely, “Don’t.”

  “Keep your mouth shut, and you can stay together. Go makin’ up stories to the law, and you won’t see that kid again until he’s eighteen. A long time.”

  Nausea swamped him. Rainey was right. They had no one else to take them in, no one who would want a teenager with a wild reputation, and a six year old with crippled legs. Not here in Cane Creek, and probably not in Quinton County. They’d be sent away to different places.

  It seemed that time waited, that all the world had gone still while he stood there, bare feet cushioned by soft carpet, cool air drifting over his bare chest. Mama was dead just down the hall and he hadn’t even been able to say goodbye. Now he had to make a decision that would either free the man who killed her or send her baby to a foster home where he’d wither away. He didn’t know what to do, couldn’t ask anyone else for help. There was no one else who could help. And he had no guarantees it’d work staying with Rainey anyway. Not if he agreed to keep quiet. He had to think . . .

  Finally he looked up at Rainey. “If I keep my mouth shut, you have to be good to Mikey from here on out. No yelling at him. No calling him a cripple. And you’ll keep your hands off him, too.”

  “Sure. Of course I will. You just gotta keep quiet. That’s all.”

  “I will as long as you don’t go back on our bargain. I mean it, Rainey. It wouldn’t take much for me to say what I had to and see you go to jail.”

  Rainey’s eyes narrowed. “We both got a lot to lose by you sayin’ anything.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll just lose a couple of years. They’ll fry you in a chair and not think twice about it.”

  When Rainey’s face went the color of chalk, he knew he had him. For what it was worth.

  It felt like he’d made a deal with the devil, but when the police finally got around to asking him what happened, he backed up Rainey’s story that Mama had tried to break up their argument and slipped on the wet floor and hit her head on the stove. Maybe they believed him because he said it straight out, no extra words, no emotion. After that first wild pain, he felt nothing. Cold inside, frozen like the road got in winter. It was like he’d used up all his emotion already.

  Not even when the doctors let him go down the hall to see Mama one last time could he dredge up any reaction. He just stood there, looking at her lying under that fresh white sheet with her face all still and cold, like one of Miss Julia’s pretty statues. Dempsey went with him, stood just inside the door of the room, silent but there, solid and real when everything else felt like some awful dream. Chantry didn’t know what to say even if he could have spoken, so he just took Mama’s cold hand in his and held it for a little while, as if she’d know he was there, as if she was really still there. She looked peaceful somehow, her hair loose around her face, though he could see where the doctors had cut her hair at the back.

  Then he thought of the photos with his father, her laughing and young and so beautiful, happiness in her eyes and on her lips, and he hoped with sudden ferocity that it wasn’t all just a colossal joke, that there really was a heaven like Mama believed and Reverend Hale claimed, and that she was there now, with his dad, happy again. She deserved that.

  He thought about it later, when Dempsey took him home to the empty house and he went out back to be with Shadow. The dog whined, stuck his head under C
hantry’s arm until he put it over him to hold him against his side.

  “It’s okay,” he got out, “it’s got to be okay. There’s got to be a heaven. There’s got to be something better than this.”

  As if he understood, Shadow let out a long sigh, resting his weight on Chantry while he stroked the soft, floppy ears. Chantry sat that way for a long time, staring at nothing, seeing things he didn’t want to see but couldn’t stop, like some movie replaying over and over again.

  Sometimes the hardest goodbyes are the ones never said, the ones that always just hang there in the back of the mind like a dark cloud. There’s so much to say but no one to say it to because the person you want most to hear it is already gone. That’s how he felt. Sorrow, regret, a wound so deep it didn’t even bleed. Like a puncture wound, an ache that didn’t heal but just hurt. He didn’t know if he wanted it to heal. That’d be too much like a final goodbye.

  Ladies from the New Cane Creek Baptist Church Women’s League came over that night with covered dishes, lasagna, spaghetti, cakes, pies, casseroles, salads, setting them all out on Mama’s table and in her clean kitchen like they belonged there. He stood in a corner and just watched, not saying anything, his eyes going back to the floor where someone had cleaned up Mama’s blood. Some of the women tried to talk to him but gave up when he only nodded or shrugged, and they focused instead on Mikey.

  Mrs. Rowan had brought Mikey home because he’d insisted, she said, and she looked rather helpless so he’d just taken Mikey’s hand and held it. It was the two of them now. He an orphan, Mikey motherless, both of them feeling lost. Stranded in a sea of well-meaning people fussing and trying to be cheerful when there wasn’t anything to be cheerful about. Talking like he couldn’t hear them.

  “Do you think it’s suitable for these poor boys to be left here with Rainey Lassiter?” Darla Pritchett said in a low tone to Eleanor Rowan, and they both glanced over at Chantry and Mikey as if expecting to see them sprout horns and forked tails.

  “Well, Mikey is his son, but Chantry . . . I just don’t know,” Mrs. Rowan replied doubtfully, and Chantry squeezed down the sudden bubble of fear that rose into his throat.

  “Perhaps we should call Social Services,” Mrs. Pritchett said then. “They have programs to help boys like Chantry, and since this is a new situation now with Carrie gone . . . mercy, I just don’t know what’ll become of them if someone doesn’t step in.”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Chantry said clearly, shocking the kitchen into silence since it was the first thing he’d said since everyone had gotten there what seemed hours before. “You can leave us alone. Mikey’s staying and I’m staying, and you’d better not even think about trying to do anything about it.”

  Eleanor Rowan looked distressed and near tears. “We just want what’s best for you.”

  “Then make them leave us alone. You can keep your food. We don’t need it and we don’t want it, and I don’t want them coming in here in my mama’s kitchen and acting like they ever gave a damn when we all know they didn’t. The only friends she ever had here in Cane Creek were you and Dempsey anyway, so all the rest of the church harpies can just go to hell as far as I care. Get them out of my mama’s house. Now.”

  That pretty much cleared out the kitchen. He must have looked really mad, because all the women scrambled out the back door like they couldn’t get out fast enough, except for Mrs. Rowan, who stood there a few minutes like she wanted to say something. Tears gleamed in her eyes, then on her cheeks, and for one awful moment he thought he might cry, too. Then she left, saying only, “I’ll be back when you need me.”

  Silence fell, deep and smothering in the kitchen still littered with grief food. After another minute, Mikey sighed and said, “Thanks, Chantry. I just didn’t think I could pretend not to be sad much longer. Why do people say I shouldn’t be sad, that I should think of Mama being in heaven and be happy?”

  “Because they’re stupid.”

  Mikey thought about that; then he said, “They don’t mean to be. I guess most of them just don’t know what else to say.”

  “I guess. Come on, sport. If you want, I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  Mikey eyed the food and shook his head. “I don’t think I’m very hungry right now.”

  He understood. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to smell lasagna again without wanting to throw up.

  Mama’s funeral was on a Wednesday. It’d started out sunny, but by eleven that morning clouds had rolled across the river and rain set in, slow and steady, the kind farmers liked to see on their fields. It hissed against umbrellas, gleamed on the blacktopped street that wound through the New Cane Creek Baptist Church cemetery. Chantry wore a suit. Not because anyone told him to, but because Mama had always wanted him to wear one and he never would. It wouldn’t make any difference to anyone but him, but he put on the suit she’d bought him the year before and wore it even though the coat sleeves came up over his wrists and the trouser cuffs hit his ankles.

  It looked like the entire town had turned out. A sea of umbrellas lined the street, and so many cars had shown up that police had to direct traffic and make people park along the road that ran beside the cemetery. Chantry recognized most of them, Mama’s students and their parents, former students, the entire congregation of New Cane Creek Baptist Church, and the community of Sugarditch. Dale Ledbetter was there, and Doc Malone, of course, but he’d expected them. He’d just never thought so many people knew Mama, much less cared enough to come out in the rain for her funeral.

  Even old man Quinton was there, along with Chris. It was the first time Chantry had seen Chris since the night of Maryann Snowdon’s party. Or noticed him, anyway. The past few days had been a blur. He’d moved through the hours in a fog, avoiding everyone he could, staying on the fringes and at a distance. He didn’t want to hear anyone else tell him that she was with God now, and had flat out told Reverend Hale if he said one word to him about being glad she was in heaven, he’d hit him in the mouth. Reverend Hale hadn’t argued the point, and the service in the chapel had been mercifully short. If he could just get through the next half hour, he might make it without doing anything else to make people talk and look at him like he was some half-wild wolf.

  Dempsey walked beside him along the wet street, tall and solemn and silent, a welcome presence. Just ahead, Rainey held Mikey’s hand. He didn’t think he’d ever seen him do that before and probably wouldn’t again. Rainey knew everyone was watching.

  Some kind of tent had been set up, with metal folding chairs lined up alongside the grave. Mama’s casket sat on a steel contraption over the open hole, and the funeral home had put bright green carpet that was supposed to look like grass over the raw earth piled behind the hole to hide it so people wouldn’t focus on the fact it’d soon be thrown in on top of her. He looked away, his throat getting tight.

  Rain pattered against the canvas tent, beat steadily on umbrellas, spattered on the ground. He breathed deep, smelled sickly sweet flowers, wet air and dirt, and a blend of perfumes worn by the women who’d come to the funeral. People crowded close, quiet and hushed. So much black, like crows lined up on a fence, supposedly the color of death. But when he thought of death he saw red, like Mama’s blood all over the floor, on the doctor’s coat, too bright and fatal.

  Then he saw white among the black, a shimmer of light breaking the anonymous line. He looked again, and Cinda Sheridan looked back at him, standing beside her mother and father, her face serious, hair loose and shiny with rain. She wore a pretty white dress that made him think of angels instead of mourning. He stared at her for a long moment, saw her mother slide an arm around her shoulders as if protecting her from him, but Cinda shrugged free.

  She walked through the rain and people until she reached him, then slid her hand into his and held fast. After that, he knew he could get through the next part, with Dempsey on one side and Cinda on the other.

  Reverend Hale spoke briefly, then ole man Quinton stood by the casket
and spoke of his admiration for Mama over the years, while Chantry stared at him and thought how easy it was for some people to lie. Then it was over and the crowd began to thin, and Cinda didn’t leave his side but stayed with him, giving her mother a defiant look when Mrs. Sheridan came to say they needed to leave. Cinda shook her head.

  “I’ll be home in a little while. School’s out today anyway. And Chantry needs his friends right now.”

  Mrs. Sheridan’s mouth tightened, but it was obvious she didn’t want to make an issue of it in front of people, so she just nodded.

  “You should probably go,” Chantry said in a low voice when Mrs. Sheridan returned to her husband’s side and the mayor glanced over at them with a frown. “There’s no point in getting in trouble over this.”

  “No. I want to be with you. If you want me, that is.”

  “Want you?” He just looked at her for a moment. Then he squeezed the hand she still had in his. “Always.”

  Cane Creek was a small town, and he knew the death rituals pretty well. People would all go to his house with food and consolation, and he didn’t think he could stand that. Rainey played the part of grieving husband well, and while no one could really think he’d changed, people offered him comfort and soothing words of concern. If he had to listen and watch it, Chantry wasn’t sure he could keep from doing something stupid and terrible.

  “I’m not going back to the house,” he told Cinda when she said she’d go with him, “I can’t.”

  Nothing felt real right now, not even being with Cinda, standing beneath the canvas tent while people drifted away, feeling more alone amidst half the town than he ever had before. The strong scent of gladiolas and carnations filled the air, dozens of flower wreaths stacked up behind the casket that gleamed with a silvery mist in the damp light.

  Dempsey came up to him, his hand holding on to Mikey, his eyes sad. “Mikey’s goin’ with me for a little while. It’ll be crowded at your house.”