She tripped and fell into a suffocating stack of hay, kicking and choking until she scrambled to her feet, awaiting the embrace of flannel arms, the crush of a cheesecloth face against her cheek, the singing of a grinning sickle as it swept in a grim harvest.
She felt nothing, though, only the sickening pull of gravity as she slammed against the loading bay door. It gave way before her, spitting her out into the moist darkness with its faint dusting of stars. She fell, spinning as awkwardly as a merry-go-round broke down, and, even if she had thought to scream, she wouldn’t have had time.
Nothing like dying to kill a good buzz, she thought, then had no thoughts at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sarah didn’t know what to make of this little get-together. She’d locked the front door, but didn’t rightly know whether she was more afraid of whatever was outside or the people inside and of what they might tell her. Odus had made the invites, so he had pretty much staked a claim to being the leader of the bunch. The Chesterfield clock above the door showed a quarter till ten, nearly her bedtime, but she had a feeling she wouldn’t be sleeping tonight.
She brought a full coffee pot to the table as Odus laid a fire in the woodstove. The general store had no insulation in the floor, and the weather had turned colder with sunset, an arctic air mass making an early entry from the Northwest. Ray Tester slouched on a bench, his brother David sitting erect, his elbows on the table as if he were about to pray. Lillian Rominger dealt cheese crackers from a cellophane pack and crunched them, the only sound in the room besides the crackling fire. Lillian’s right hand was swathed in gauze and tape. Sue Norwood stood to one side, playing with a wind chime, not far from where the mouse-munching goat had passed not more than four hours ago.
“Come have a seat, Miss Norwood,” Sarah said. “Got some drip grind right here.”
“Half off?” Odus asked with a crooked grin.
“I’ll take half off your head if you keep talking like this. We’re supposed to be serious.”
Sue sat beside David, in one of the wooden-slatted chairs with uneven legs. The preacher nodded to her. Sarah sat a Styrofoam cup in front of her and filled it before Sue could say whether or not she wanted some. When all the cups were full, she put the coffee pot on top of the woodstove and sat at the table with the others. Odus tossed a splintery chunk of locust into the stove and closed the cast-iron mouth, then stood and looked around the dining area.
“I reckon we all know each other,” Odus said. “So let’s just get right to it. The plain truth of it is Harmon’s come back to Solom and all hell’s about to break loose.”
Ray shook his head. “You’ve been in the bourbon. Only a drunk would talk like that.”
“He’s here.”
“Harmon Smith is dead and planted, long gone to dust. That’s just an old wives’ tale.”
“Speaking of wives, then, where’s yours?”
Ray shut up at that, but Sue cut in with, “Who is Harmon Smith?”
“The Circuit Rider,” David said. “Some call him in the man in the black hat or the horseback preacher. He rode these mountains in the early 1800s as a Methodist, set him up a homestead and a garden. He was a little touched in the head, though, and started bucking the Methodist beliefs, turned to sacrificing animals in the Old Testament fashion. They say he was murdered on a mountain trail one night. Some believe it was fellow Methodists who did him in, others say it was the ones who began to follow his ways.”
“I reckon they figured if animal sacrifice made God happy, then offering up a human ought to do wonders,” Odus said. “But he didn’t stay dead.”
“Sounds like so much horse shit to me,” Ray said.
“There are ladies present,” David said. Ray turned away.
“Don’t hold back on my account,” Sarah said. She ought to jump in and confess that she’d seen the Circuit Rider. After all, David was a preacher, even if he believed a messiah had already come and gone in this world, and Catholics said confession was good for the soul. But the words wouldn’t leave her lips. She’d heard the local legends all her life, but had never put too much stock in them. Jews had their dybbuks and golems, but nowhere did men of God ever come back from the dead to bring suffering to the living.
But had the Circuit Rider brought suffering? In all the stories she’d heard, the man had done nothing more than appear, like the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, or the devil in the clouds of those mocked-up photos that graced the cover of the “Weekly World News.” Sure, some claimed he caused calamity and death, but plain bad luck could account for a lot of the mishaps.
What had the man said to her? I’m back. Like it was neither a brag nor a threat, just a plain fact.
“It’s one of those things where you need to make believers out of people,” Odus said. “No offense, Elder David, but your branch of Baptists don’t go in for conversion.”
Sue raised her hand, like the new student in a grade school class. “Sorry, folks, but I don’t get any of this, and I’m not sure why I’m here.”
Odus nodded, went around the middle aisle to the dry goods section, and returned stooped over, rolling a battered ten-speed. The wheels wobbled, the chain dragged the floor, and the seat cushion was gouged and pocked. It looked as if it had been trampled by a herd of elephants. “Recognize this?”
“That’s one the Everharts rented.”
“Found it on Switchback Trail, off in the laurels. No sign of the couple, just a bunch of scuffed leaves by the creek. But there was this.” Odus held up a small flashlight that appeared to have dried blood on the handle.
“I told you we should have called the cops,” Sue said.
“What for?” Odus said. “This is Solom’s problem. It’s our job to take care of it. Besides, what would we tell them? That a man two hundred years dead has come back to square things with them that did him in?”
“Hold on,” Lillian said. “You don’t think this is supernatural, do you?”
“I just know what I seen. What about you, Elder David?”
David lowered his eyes. The stove popped in the gap of silence, and the long stovepipe ticked with rising heat. Hickory smoke that had escaped during the igniting of the fire now settled in a blue-gray layer five feet off the floor. Sarah wished she had a chore, another pot of coffee or a round of sandwiches to give out on the house.
“Sarah?” Odus challenged her, his blue eyes piercing hers, somehow harder to meet since they weren’t bloodshot. “You saw him, didn’t you?”
Sarah looked at the counter, and the glass pickle jar by the register with the change in it. The jar held donations for Rupert Walpole, a retired postal carrier who had developed cancer of the larynx. As if a few dollars could make any difference once the cancer dug its claws into you. Just like the Circuit Rider had wormed his way back into Solom’s heart. “He came in, all right,” she said. “Walked right to the cash register like he was born here and knew every inch of this community. How can that be, if he’s been dead all this time?”
Ray gave a rat-squeak of laughter. “Tell us, Brother David. I bet you got it all figured out, with your Bible and your big words. You’re the one who’s big on believing things you can’t see.”
“I haven’t seen him,” David said. “But something strange is going on here.”
Lillian stood up. “I’m sorry, David. This is getting too wacky for me. I need to get home.”
“And do what, Lillian?” David said. “Tend to your goats?” He nodded at her wounded hand. “Feed them?”
Lillian sat. Sarah felt sorry for her. She was one of the imports, an alien invader, but they were all tourists when you got right down to it, even the ones who were born here. First came the buffalo, then the Cherokee came after the buffalo, then the Virginia hunters came after the buffalo, then the buffalo were gone and the Cherokee were gone and the hunters were driven off by the settlers who squatted in these hills.
Then came people like Harmon Smith to save them, and he was driv
en into his grave, and came the wagon trains and the railroad and the Model T and Jewish merchants and a post office, then a bed-and-breakfast, a rental-cabin retreat, a bunch of summer people, and it seemed like everything just kept pushing and pushing until the place called Solom was ripe for something like Harmon Smith. Something that would make the whole crazy cycle complete, knock this little Appalachian valley back to the way God intended from the beginning. “I guess that brings us to the goats,” Sarah said.
“I saw one,” Sue said. “Down by the river. It must have got out of its fence.”
“One of them bit Lillian, then chased us into her house,” David said. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so gosh-darned creepy.”
“They been breeding like rabbits this year,” Odus said, letting the bike rest against a chain-saw sculpture. “Seems like everybody’s got a herd, and they’re acting more ornery than usual.”
“Found four goat heads in my hayfield,” Ray said. “Figured it was kids playing tricks, or else some pissed-off neighbor trying to gum up my bush hog.”
“Speaking of neighbors, why ain’t Gordon Smith here?” Sarah said, determined not to mention the goat she’d found in the store earlier.
“Gordon don’t take kindly to talk about the Circuit Rider,” Odus said. “It’s his kin, after all.”
“Well, he’s got the biggest goat herd on this side of the county. If anything funny’s going on with the animals, he’d probably know about.”
“I was over mending fence for him last week.” Odus moved over by the woodstove. “He told me a few of his nannies would go into rut this week. His eyes got all far away when he said it, like there was a mountain somewhere that needed climbing. And his scarecrow ... well, never mind about that.”
“His wife was in today, looking like she’d swallowed a happy pill,” Sarah said.
“Remember the last time the goats got uppity?” Ray said.
“Yeah,” Odus said. “Right before Gordon’s first wife got killed in that car wreck.”
“Shit,” Ray said. “You don’t reckon Gordon Smith has gone wacko and decided to take up Harmon’s old ways, do you?”
“No matter what they say about Harmon Smith, he was a man of God,” David said. “I just can’t believe God would send anything to His Earth unless there was a good reason.”
“God don’t need no devil, does He?” Ray taunted. “He’s done decided who’s going to heaven, so what’s the point? Ain’t that what you’re preaching to the flock, Brother?”
“You ought to come to a service once in a while,” David said. “Might do you good to get down on your knees and wash somebody’s feet.”
“Save the family feud for later and let’s worry about the Circuit Rider,” Odus said. “I ain’t ever been sure whether Jesus Christ is going to return or not, but I know for a fact that Harmon Smith has.”
“Do you think he—or it, whatever it is—killed the Everharts?” Sue asked.
“I don’t know.” Odus stroked his beard, picked something from the hairs and stared at it. “Might be he’s setting things right, as he sees it. The Everharts ain’t from Solom. Or it might have something to do with the goats.”
Lillian took her coffee cup away from her lips. The white rim was ragged, and the perfect imprint of her teeth showed where she’d been biting into the Styrofoam. “Well, even if we accept what you’re saying, and we’ve got a vengeful preacher in our midst, what in the world are we supposed to do about it?”
“That’s what this meeting’s about,” Odus said. “Any ideas?” He looked around the room.
Sarah shook her head. She was determined not to get dragged into this mess. Who cared if goats wandered her aisles and a stranger in black stopped by once in a while? As long as her routine didn’t change, and the Circuit Rider didn’t do away with her best customers, she was willing to live and let live. If such a thing applied to dead people.
“I guess this isn’t a garlic-and-crucifix kind of thing, is it?” Sue asked. “I mean, nobody’s come up with a mythology. I’d almost rather have a vampire or werewolf, something that had rules.”
“You’re the Bible guy,” Odus said to David. “What do you make of it?”
“Harmon Smith seemed to follow some of the Celtic ideas of harvest sacrifice,” David said. “Gordon probably knows more about that than anybody, since he teaches it at the college.”
“Well, you work for him,” Ray said. “Anything peculiar going on at the Smith place?”
“He’s been mighty riled up about his scarecrow,” Odus said. “Muttering strange stuff under his breath and tending to his goats.”
“Every religious figure needs a flock,” Lillian said. “Without Moonies, Sun Myung Moon would be just another businessman.”
“Moon do what?” Ray said.
“The leader of the Unification Church,” she said. “He has a church in Washington, D.C., and owns a ton of real estate and international newspapers. The conspiracy theorists believe Moon has his mouth whispering in the ear of our politicians while his fingers are slipping cash into their back pockets. Some say even the president is an ally.”
“Now don’t you be knocking George Dubya,” Ray said. “The worst thing that ever happened to Solom was letting Democrats come in. If Clinton was a Jew, he’d have been the Antichrist.”
Sarah didn’t rise to the bait, though she made a mental note of his remark. Her father had changed the family name from Jaffe to Jeffers before moving to Solom. She’d never made a big deal about being Jewish, though she was the only one in the valley, though so many summer people had built homes here that some were bound to be Jewish. She wasn’t all that religious, anyway, and she sold plenty of knick-knacks that featured Bible verses or pictures of a snow-white Christ.
All she knew about the Moonies was from the Guinness Book of World Records, where they set the record for the number of people married at one time. Out of the thousands, most of them were strangers. Well, she supposed your odds of getting divorced were about the same as whether you thought you were in love. She’d been in love a couple of times, and in something close enough to it a few other times, and they’d all ended up the same.
“Maybe the goats tie in with fertility and harvest,” David said. “The more you sacrifice, the more they multiply. The Old Testament sacrifices were all about pleasing God. It’s the same with most religions, whether you’re lighting candles, taking communion, shaving your head, or offering food.”
“All I know is the billy goats don’t like it when you talk about gelding them,” Lillian said, holding up her injured hand.
“Hold on a minute, folks,” Sue said. “I can accept that the Circuit Rider is real. After all, every legend has a basis in fact. And I’ll even buy that goats are evil. I mean, with those creepy eyes and cloven hooves, how could anybody think otherwise? And let’s assume ‘its hour come round,’ as the Yeats poem goes, and Solom is our backwoods Bethlehem. After all, the battle of Armageddon has to start somewhere. The question, what do we do about it?”
They all looked at each other, except Lillian, who was staring into the bottom of her coffee cup as if the answer was spelled out there. “I reckon we have to find a way to take down the Circuit Rider,” Odus said. “We have to figure out what he wants, then give it to him and make him go away.”
“What if he wants us all to suffer like starving dogs on a slow trip to hell?” Ray said.
“Revenge,” David said. “He might hold the people of Solom responsible for his death, and his spirit can’t rest in peace.”
“Maybe he’s looking for his horse,” Lillian offered.
“What I think,” Odus said, “and I can’t blame him because I kind of feel the same way, and I’ve only been here 38 years instead of 200, is he’s come to clean house. If he’s really been around all this time, he’s probably sick of flatlanders coming up here and building on our ridge tops, crowding the valley with their SUVs and bluegrass festivals, flushing their shit in the river. I’d bet he’s just
homesick, and since it looks like God won’t let him into heaven and the devil doesn’t have the room to spare, old Harmon’s stuck here and decided to take on Solom as a fixer-upper.”
“And he’s doing it by killing tourists?” Sue said.
“Well, he’s been killing us for years and years,” Odus said. “Maybe he’s decided he needs to hurry things along now, because of all the growth. So he goes after the rest of us, probably trimming back to the handful of families that were around when he first came to Solom.”
“The only problem with that theory is he’s a tourist just like the rest of us,” David said. “You can’t turn back the clock.”
“You can’t come back from the dead, either.”
Sarah suddenly felt all alone, even in the presence of company. She imagined the general store under the great crushing weight of night. Despite the ticking wood stove, a chill settled into her brittle bones. Darkness pressed against the window, and the porch light did little to scare it off. Black was every color rolled into one, they said, and when everything bled together it made just the one color, the absence of light. And it looked like there was going to be plenty of bleeding going on.
A clatter arose from the front of the store, near the register. She’d turned off the lights as she usually did at closing time, and the corners of the store were cloaked in shadows.
“Who’s there?’ she said. Nobody could have broken in without her hearing. But somehow the goat had passed through these walls, and a man who could command goats and defy the grave probably wouldn’t be considerate enough to knock. Besides. he’d already paid her a visit once.
The Circuit Rider stepped into the light. He held a pack of Beechnut chewing tobacco in his hand, and as they watched, he slowly peeled the foil pack open and shoved a moist wad into his mouth, shreds of the dark tobacco dribbling down his chin to the floor. The brim of his hat was turned low, but the bottom half of his face was waxen and milk-colored, not as ghostly as when Sarah had first seen him. His mouth was filled with broad, blunt teeth, like those of a grazing animal.
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