by Faith Hunter
The church fell deeply silent. Jackie’s face blanched and then bright red spots of wrath lit his cheekbones.
“We will not allow such conduct and evil to be hidden,” Daddy said, his words ringing in the silence. “No longer. The old ways must change. These accusations and proof of evil are a harbinger of that change.”
Unexpected pride welled up in me. Pride at my daddy. I never once in my whole life thought I’d be proud of a Nicholson.
“Agreed,” Elder Aden said. “As to the accused abuse of Ernest Jackson Jr.’s concubines? What evidence is there?”
My brother said, “I got photographs.”
“Let me see them pictures, Sam,” Elder Aden said.
Sam pulled something from his pocket and stepped to Elder Aden. I couldn’t see what it was without raising my head but I heard Elder Aden say, “By all that’s holy. When did you take these?”
“Less than half an hour ago, at the new punishment room on the back of the preacher’s house.”
“Does it meet church methods of sanction?” Sister Erasmus asked.
Daddy said, “The issue of criminal abuse of women can no longer be considered a private church issue, but one that directly impacts the entire church. This is the first time of address, but meets church charter for direct and urgent threats against the people of the congregation by a member. Change is upon us and this church must not, will not, shrink from facing it.”
“Agreed,” Elder Aden said. He nodded to the congregation and then set a steely eye on Jackson Jr. “Set yourself down a spell, preacher. We’uns’ll be here awhile.”
Weapons were readied for firing, the kerclunk sound of a single-action bolt rifle, and something newer, with a sharper, higher-pitched sh-shick sound. A pump shotgun. Several semiautomatic handguns. I looked around and saw three armed men standing in one pew, what had to be a bunch of Jackie’s cronies. Four weapons were aimed at them, held by Amos, Rufus, Jedidiah, and Elder Aden. Daddy had his old double-barreled shotgun squarely on Jackie at the front of the church.
Acid boiled under my breastbone and threatened to rise. My fingers and toes were tingling, my breath coming too fast. Beside me, a feeling of panic transmitted to me through Mud’s fingertips on my arm.
“I said set!” Elder Aden thundered. The men sat, and he placed his weapon in the hands of a middle-aged man in the pew behind him. “Disarm and guard them boys. Nicholson men’ll remain standing and will be seeing that they behave until this is settled according to the laws of Scripture and the church charter. And the police.”
Elder Aden accepted a second weapon, a huge six-shooter, from Sister Erasmus and assumed a two-hand stance, the gun aimed at the podium. “Jackie, iffen you pull that gun, I’ll shoot you myself. Set down in your chair.”
Elder Aden was holding a handgun on Jackie. In church. I thought I might throw up. My flesh was buzzing with what felt like a storm of hornets stinging me. Confusion. Fear. Terrible fear. Worse than any I had ever felt, because this was my family in danger. And my family was standing up for me. For abused women. Mud squeezed my arm harder, and I squeezed the butt of the six-shooter harder.
The seconds stretched out, fraught with tension. Finally Jackie snarled and replaced whatever he had been holding behind the podium. He took his chair, a good four feet from the weapon.
From behind me, Joshua Purdy shouted, “I contest the compensation to the Ingram whore! I claim that the accusations against me are lies. I demand witnesses and evidence!” His voice quaked with anger and panic.
Gently, Daddy said, “Nell?”
I wanted nothing but to crawl under the pew, between the feet of the congregation, and out the door. But words and actions came to me, as if they had been growing like a vine in the back of my mind, all with purpose. Slowly, I peeled Mud’s fingers off my arm and stood up, setting the basket on the pew seat, standing with the men of my family. Haltingly, I said, “I am Nell Nicholson Ingram, widow of John Ingram. Jackie and Joshua shot up my house.” I left out mention of Brother Ephraim, preferring to leave him out altogether. “Joshua beat me.” I dropped the shawl that had hidden me to my shoulders and held my face to the sunlight coming through the chapel windows. “And he cut away my clothes.”
Sister Erasmus shouted, “Shame! Joshua Purdy is accused of bringing shame to a churchwoman, a widder-woman who was without dishonor.”
Jackie started to reply and I shouted quickly, “Joshua and Jackie intended harm to me but were interrupted by the arrival of law enforcement officers. They wished for me to take this complaint to the court of the land and would be witnesses in that court of law. But first I brought this to my family and to the church as according to the Scriptures.”
“Nell?” Daddy said again. I moved to the end of the pew and Daddy stepped to the side, making room for me in the aisle. I lifted my head and turned in a circle, making sure that my bruises were visible to all.
As I moved, someone finally spoke from the Purdy pew, sounding like Joshua’s mother. “My son never beat your daughter. You got no proof! Your daughter is a wanton whore!”
“Nell Ingram called up a devil, a demon, to stop me from having my way with her!” Joshua said, his voice defiant, but his argument proving his guilt. “She’s a witch! Look all you’uns! See what her demon did to me!” Joshua yanked down on his collar and showed us his neck and the scratches and piercings from Paka’s claws. “She should be burned or stoned with stones as the Scripture commands.”
My daddy said to Joshua, “To stop you from having your way with her? By thine own words thou art condemned.”
Old Man Aden repeated, “By thine own words thou art condemned.”
A too-long beat later, the congregation said, mostly together, but with clear sections of the church remaining silent and undecided, “By thine own words thou art condemned.”
I said, “A black cat got you, Joshua. We can all see that. And if anyone summoned up a demon, it was you.”
Joshua’s eyes went wide. Clearly he had never been accused of witchcraft.
“Did you, Preacher Jackson, bite your concubines?” Sister Erasmus demanded, bringing the accusation back to Jackie. “Did you harm them in ways no decent man would, like some kinda vampire, biting them for their blood?”
At that, Jackie lunged for the podium. Elder Aden’s gun tracked him, but the older man hesitated an instant too long and didn’t fire. Jackie pulled a huge gun. He pointed it at me. And everything went to hell in a handbasket.
FIFTEEN
I remembered Rick’s comment about a Mexican standoff, and for half a second, this looked like the same thing, except no one here would heal easily from gunshot wounds. We’d bleed and die like regular humans. That was the thought I had before Jackie’s gun thundered, reverberating blamblamblam in the tall ceilings, the shots loud and too fast.
I had a moment’s thought about the training Daddy had given his family, because all of them hit the floor as the first shot was fired, all but me. Daddy shoved me into the pew, to the floor, where I landed on top of Mama and a passel of Nicholson young’uns who were crawling for the exits. Daddy’s shotgun blasted twice, then several others. Daddy fell on top of me, and his blood pulsed across my face. Without thinking, I pulled off the scarf Mama had wrapped me in, shoved it deep into Daddy’s wound, and covered it with my hand, pressing. The pulsing stopped, but the gunfire went on. Deafening, breath-stealing, glass-shattering booms that went on forever. I could make out screaming, Some of it from the Nicholsons below and around me. Mama and Mud were still here, and my sister pulled off her jacket, applying it to another gunshot, this one a leaking hole in Daddy’s leg, not the pulsing mess I was trying to stifle. Mud looked mad. Determined. Not afraid. Mama stretched out beside us, holding John’s old revolver, which had tumbled in the carnage, as if she knew how to use it. The gunfight blasted away the dawn. Screams. Deafening concussions. Mama fired my gun at someone in the a
isle.
Mama Carmel crawled across the empty space under the pew in front and slid up to Daddy, adding a pile of clean cloth diapers to my scarf. I had stopped breathing, and I remembered to inhale only when the blackness of oxygen deprivation closed in on my eyesight and I was near to passing out. With the breath came thoughts from my self-schooling, my mind bombarding me with trivia, searching for a way out of this. A quote by Patton came to me, one by Sun Tzu, both useless.
Then one by Harry Truman came to me, saying, “Carry the battle to them.”
“Yeah,” I whispered to myself. Now, that was helpful.
I rolled out from under Daddy so Mama Carmel could get to him better, and I took his shotgun with me. I felt around in his jacket pockets and found four more shotgun shells. In the cramped quarters, Daddy bleeding and maybe dying on one side, and the Nicholson women on my other side, I reloaded the shotgun.
Someone grabbed my arm and I jerked away, but it was only Priss, my sister, lying with her sister wife on the floor behind us, under the Campbell pew. Cowering. And that made me madder. We women didn’t need to be cowering on the floor. We needed to be taking the battle to Jackie and whoever was helping him. We needed to be fighting back. Protecting ourselves, not waiting on a man to save us. But it would kill my sister to shoot another person. And I had ample proof that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought about it.
At that thought, the awareness of blood, rich and thick and full of life, hit me. Blood everywhere. So much blood. But it wasn’t on the ground and not on Soulwood, and the longing to take it for the land was muted. But the longing for vengeance beat in me, like a drum through my veins.
“Stay down,” I shouted to Mud and Priss and the other Nicholson women. Mama shouted my name as I crawled to the front of the church, in the shadows beneath the pews, my knees and toes and elbows pushing and pulling me forward, my skirt dragging. Wishing I was in my overalls.
I reached the front of the church and spotted Jackie crouched behind the pulpit. He was reloading his revolver. I rolled to my knees and then to my feet, and pushed off the wood floor, into a sprint. Screaming, I took the three long steps to fall upon the dais. Half rolled to the side of the podium. Pointed the shotgun. Squeezed the trigger. The recoil slammed me back, bruising my shoulder. My heartbeat pounded in my ears. My breath heaved, hidden beneath the deafness from the concussion of shots.
Jackie was bleeding, but still on his knees, staring at me, his mouth a snarl of hatred. I resettled the shotgun and fired again. He staggered. I reloaded even as Jackie finished reloading his pistol. He lifted his gun to center it on me. I fired first. And again. By the last round, time had done something perplexing. It had slowed down. And it was as if I could see each shot leave the weapon, a puff of smoke, a shadow of shot pellets.
The shot was tightly centered at this distance. Right into the middle of Jackie Jr.’s torso and up his arms. Crimson blood gushed and pulsed into the room. The stink of gunfire and the smell of released bowels was foul on the air.
Blood spattered and pulsed. Jackie fell backward, and as I watched, his face went white. His hands loosed, and he dropped the big handgun. I watched it fall, and, without even thinking about it, I batted the gun away and back into Jackie’s vacant chair, so it wouldn’t land wrong and go off. In hindsight, that would be a move that I shouldn’t have made, as hitting the gun could have caused the same firing problem I was trying to prevent, but at the time I was glad the gun was on the chair and out of his hands.
Jackie bounced on the floor and went still. His blood spread scarlet all across the dais, the pool widening fast. His legs bent backward beneath him. I peeked out from the podium and saw Joshua vault out the front door and off the small front porch, directly at Occam and Rick.
I rolled over and retched. And then Occam was there with me, taking away the shotgun and wiping it free of my fingerprints. He left the shotgun on the floor in the pool of Jackie’s blood and lifted me like a baby. His skin was hot and feverish. Or I was going into shock and feeling too cold.
I looked down and saw the bloodstain on my good gray skirt. At first I thought, Daddy’s blood, but it was spreading. I’d been shot. My mind scrambled for something to hold on to and it found Tecumseh’s words. “‘When your time comes to die . . .’” I whispered, “‘sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.’” I wondered what kind of song I was supposed to sing when I was dying, and all I could think of was “Onward Christian Soldiers” and, oddly, that made me laugh. Which hurt really bad.
“Nell? Nell! Medic! I need an ambulance!” Occam’s voice was tinny with the damage to my ears, but even with the concussion damage, I could hear the growl in his throat. And his eyes were golden brown as he carried me out the back entrance of the church, the one behind the podium. “Gunfight at the damn O.K. Corral,” he growled. “Fools with an arsenal in a church full of children. Medic!” He was right. Half the men and boys in the church must a had guns.
“Put me under that tree.” I pointed to an oak I had hugged when I was child, hugged for the solace I needed after a whooping with Daddy’s belt. I had come away soothed, and the tree had been soothed as well. Would it remember me? My own trees recognized me, but would this old friend? I took a breath and pain blossomed inside me, through me, like a bomb going off, like a cactus flower opening, though such things were opposites in every possible way. When Occam tried to take me around to the front of the church, I set my nails into his skin like a cat might and pushed on him with my mind. “Human medicine might hurt me more than help me. Take me to that tree.” When he didn’t turn around, I said, “Stop!”
Occam stopped, standing as still as the tree I wanted, uncertainty and confusion holding him in place, turmoil rushing through him so intense that I could feel his cat roil beneath the skin of his arms. “But we have SWAT and FBI and ambulances coming,” he said.
“Please,” I whispered, my fingers gripping his biceps.
He reversed course and carried me to the tree. “Put me down,” I said. Moving stiffly, as if he was doing something he was already regretting, he set me on the ground, my back against the tree. His motions were jerky, and my body lurched, making pain pummel and twist through me. I couldn’t hold back a moan. Occam growled, longer, louder.
I reached up and grabbed his chin with my bloody hand, and said, “Stop that. You cannot shift into your cat here. They will burn you.”
Occam went as still as death for perhaps an entire second before he said, “Thank you, Nell, sugar.”
“Now I need to be alone or I may die.”
“And if I leave you alone, will you live?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t never— I have never . . . done a healing before, but it might work. It feels right to try.” It was possible that the tree could help. Or, no, I couldn’t say that.
“Then try. But I’m calling for an ambulance crew back here too, Nell, sugar. Every unit in the county is heading this way.”
“Take care of my daddy first.” My back was to the bark, and my legs were stretched out, spindly in the leggings beneath the bloody skirt. The tree’s warmth hummed through the ground, content, as soothing as the last time I came to it for consolation. But would the tree recognize me? I laid back my head. Occam punched his cell phone, demanding an ambulance.
I put both of my hands into my rushing blood, and it was warmer and stickier than I expected. I placed both hands on the lower trunk, near the ground, propping myself. And I called to Soulwood through the tree. My trees didn’t answer. Nothing but the soothing of this one tree, which wasn’t mine. I called again. And again. My breath came fast and shallow. My heartbeat stumbling. And softly, distantly, a weak pulse of my land answered, Soulwood turning its attention to the feel/smell/taste of my blood trickling across the tree roots and soaking into the ground. Salty taste of death.
Within the tree behind me, something shivered, something loosened, some ineffable, w
arm something, shivered through the oak and out to me. Recognition. “Yes,” I whispered. “Hey there.” From far away, Soulwood beat through the ground, finding me. Enveloping the tree. Encircling me. The earth bubbled and roiled beneath my palms, the dirt vibrating up and over my fingers, covering my bloody hands, rootlets growing fast, trapping me.
Occam stepped back, swearing. Voice unsteady, he canceled the ambulance he had demanded for me.
Life throbbed from my wood and the earth answered, the trees recognizing me, even from here. Soulwood latched onto the oak, through the hill and the soil and the rocks. The tree behind me quivered, its leaves rustling in a wind that wasn’t there. Its roots and the earth they were planted in drank down my blood, pulling it into the earth, sucking it greedily from my fingers.
They reached for my blood. Oak rootlets bent and distorted, rotated and curled and rose from the ground, sending small plumes of dirt into the air. Roots wrapped around my hands and wrists, holding me tight.
I was too weak to fight, even had I wanted to. Other rootlets, thin, knobby things with even smaller fingers, spun and revolved and climbed across my skirt, sucking up the blood that flooded out of me. They drank it down. Empowered by my life force, by the blood that was pumping hot and fast, the roots grew in size and purpose, stealing breath and heat, and pressing into me. Into my wound where they pirouetted and looped and twined together and wove a knot, inside the wound. Another knot. They tightened. And they stilled.
My blood flow stopped. It just . . . stopped. I couldn’t draw a breath. Couldn’t move. My heart beat funny and fast, skipping like a toddler pounding on an overturned pot, no rhythm, no purpose. I wasn’t sure I remembered how to breathe.
Occam leaned over me, shock and horror and bewilderment on his face. But no fear, no pulling away. I smiled at him and because I wanted to speak, I forced the breath I had forgotten. Voice scratchy and rough as bark, I said, “It’s okay. I’ll live now. Don’t cut me free until I ask you to.”