November Mourns

by Tom Piccirilli

It was worse this time. The movement beneath the turnings of the world squirmed closer, almost on him before he noticed.

  He hadn’t been vigilant enough. He’d waited too long. They were coming for him at the knees, from behind, crawling. Sweat beaded on his face and he had to reach for the rail to steady himself.

  Rising now in back of him, knowing he was aware of it, the incomplete figure allowed itself to be observed for a second as it withdrew, hesitantly, like it was almost ready to speak to him.

  Shad didn’t want to drop where he was and scare his father, but he watched his own hand turn ashen, the veins sticking out as black as if he’d been poisoned. He found himself seated on the bottom porch stair.

  Pa came up out of his rocker crying, “Son? You ill? Are you hurt or you just been drinkin’ with your friends?”

  It gave him an excuse. Shad smiled, hoping he looked abashed. “Must’ve had one too many with Jake Hapgood.”

  “That’s all right, you earned yourself some good times after what you been through. If you’re gonna be sick, turn your chin to the weeds.”

  Pa’s broad, stony face loosened into an expression of care, like he was glad to have somebody left to dote on. His father’s strong hands came down and pulled Shad to his feet. Shad went with it for a moment, laying his cheek against Pa’s chest, hearing the beat of his powerful heart, that aggressive strength of life within him.

  The log house, no less alluring than a tomb, beckoned him inside and he went easily. As they passed through the doorway, he saw Megan’s fingers flutter at him from the depths of his darkened old bedroom.

  Pa laid him out on the couch, the way he would’ve years ago when Shad had a fever. Mags would carry a bowl of soup in from the kitchen and feed him while he shivered on the hard cushions. Pa never stuffed enough cotton or feather into them because he liked the feel of the shaved wood against his back.

  “Time’s coming, isn’t it?”

  “I think so,” Shad said.

  “I hear tell you been asking about the back hills. The Pharisee and Jonah Ridge. Been stirring up a lot of folks.” Then, with the grin chiseled into his rough features, “But you got the hollow buzzing again.”

  Shad waited.

  “You goin’ up there by yourself?” Pa asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Want me to come?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t believe so.” It seemed to both rile and sadden the man, the relief showing through. Shad got the sudden but explicit impression that he didn’t know his father very well at all, and never would. “I get scared sometimes, son.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t reckon I grasp hold of it exactly. I tend to . . . to just grow fearful, when I’m sitting on the porch. I worry that I didn’t do right by my women, your mother and sister included. That the dead don’t rest in the hollow, and they carry their resentment with them. Sounds foolish, I know, but it’s the truth. I only hope Megan understands I did my best by her. You think she might not?”

  Shad checked his room to see if Mags’s hand would give him a sign, either yes or no or perhaps sometimes. It was gone. He turned back and his father was staring at him intently, caring about his response. “You’ve done your best by all of us, Pa, you’ve got nothing to regret.”

  Even as he said it, he knew it was too broad a statement to make on another man’s behalf, even his father. Pa shifted uncomfortably in his seat, as if the frame of the chair wasn’t harsh enough against him.

  “You ought to get married. Marry Elfie and go someplace else. Out on the coast, go live by the ocean.” Pa’s smile was nailed in place, as fake as his words. Shad realized his old man was giving him an out, a chance to run from the responsibilities already handed down to him.

  There was a serenity in their immediate circumstances that wouldn’t last long now. Without meaning to do so, they had somehow reached a discreet balance. Shad couldn’t push or pull at his pa. Any pressure would offset the moment. There was so much he wanted to hear his father say, yet Shad was afraid that, in telling them, his father’s secrets would prove to be too common to carry any real weight.

  Even if the man didn’t know it, he would always be part myth to his son—a legend, a desperate fable just as Shad’s mother continued to be. The sorcery of tradition and personal history carried down forever.

  His father had grown up in the hollow, left at seventeen, and came back when he was thirty-five. You had to let some questions slide, but this was no longer one of them.

  “Why’d you leave town? For those eighteen years. You’ve never said.”

  Pa, with the dread rising in his eyes. “What’s that?”

  They all made you repeat yourself. They needed to give themselves an extra second to form their rebuttals, think up their lies, and find a hole to squirrel into.

  Shad left his question dangling in the air.

  “That’s not what you’re really asking. You want to know why I come back here.”

  “Yes.”

  His father furrowed his brow and stared, first at Shad, then at the dog, and finally back toward Megan’s room, as if all the solutions to his life’s concerns were lying somewhere between.

  “There was no point in me staying anywhere else,” Pa said.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause I carried the hollow with me wherever I went. It was too deep in my heart and in my way of being. So I come back. That’s all there is to it.”

  Now Shad had no last corner to run into. It was deep in his blood, his domination by this place.

  The rage clawed up his back, settled there and twined about his throat. His words came out in a wretched whisper. “Callie Anson told me that Megan might’ve been in love.”

  “With who?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.” His muscles tightened until he snapped out of his seat, every nerve in riot, the near hysteria ripping through him. “You must’ve seen it!”

  “Seen what?”

  “Stop making me repeat myself!”

  “I didn’t see nothing special. There were never any boys around. She never mentioned a word of anything like that to me.”

  “Did you pay any attention to her in the end?”

  “Don’t swing on me like that, son.”

  “Or what?”

  His father’s powerful hand came up and flattened against Shad’s heart. Maybe they were just both after a fight, getting primal here the way it sometimes had to be when your hatred had nowhere to go except into the flesh of your flesh. But Pa’s eyes were clear and mournful and affectionate, and the anger quickly drained from Shad.

  So close like this—another inch and he’d have been crying in the man’s arms, letting everything out that was locked inside.

  He broke away and moved to the other end of the room. “Callie said that Mags believed somebody was in love with her. Maybe coming after her.”

  “It was that Zeke Hester.”

  “Not according to her. She said Zeke kept his distance.”

  “You must’ve argued with her some on that, seeing what you did to him the other day.”

  “I didn’t mind what happened, but I didn’t go looking for it either. He came at me and I put him down. But I don’t think he caused Megan any more trouble after that first fracas.”

  “I don’t know who it could’ve been then. You think I wouldn’t notice a thing like that if I’d seen it? You believe I’m lying to you?”

  His father had played him along, beginning with the phone call in prison. Your sister’s been killed. Come home ’fore you get on with your life. Pa had needed him to do this thing and follow it to its end, because Karl Jenkins was incapable of doing it himself.

  Shad didn’t mind much. This had more to do with Pa’s devotion to his daughter and belief in his son than any need for vengeance or even resolution. Maybe, in some small way, it was supposed to be a gift.

  “Why are you so afraid of that place?” Shad asked. He was a stupid detective. In the end all it came down to
was asking the same questions and hoping someone took enough pity to give you a direct answer.

  “We always been. Your mama was too. I don’t rightly know why, it’s just the way it always was.”

  “M’am Luvell . . .”

  “I can guess what she told you. She thinks ghosts and evil spirits stole her kin. I ain’t sayin’ she’s wrong. The fact is, all you hear about that place, it all might be true as the sunset. It’s a bad road. What else are you going to wind up with when you leave poor diseased folks up there to die? There’s murder up that way.” Pa’s gaze drew down on Shad, eyes dark as shale. “You hear me when you want to, so you hear me now. If you got to take a life to save your own, you do it.”

  Shad pulled his chin back. “Pa?”

  “You listen to your father and no more back talk. You make me proud, son. You always have. You handle your load better than I ever endured mine.” He stood and drifted into the shadows of the house. “Stay the night in your old room. You got reasons for everything you do, same as any of us. Mine come to me on occasion when I’m asleep. Maybe you’ll recollect some of yours tonight too.”

  AT DAWN, HE ROSE FROM THE PORCH CHAIR. FOR some reason he felt closer to Megan outside, where he could stare into the night sky and look up the road at where she was buried.

  Shad found his boots in the closet, remembered what Dave Fox had said about timber rattlers. He heard his father awake in his bedroom but the man didn’t come out.

  As he drove away Lament loped after the car. It might be good to have a hound up in the hills, even one that was only a pup, but Shad feared that with this trouble coming the dog might be hurt, and he couldn’t bear to be the cause of that. You had to make an effort to save what was close to you, even if it was only a dog.

  Shad drew up to the shadow of his mother’s tombstone angling down from the hill in the expanding sunlight.

  But a compulsion overcame him and he slowed and parked directly in its path.

  He turned and looked to the lonely field where the graves of Mama and Mags sat side by side.

  Fighting for his calm once again, he shut his eyes and tried to center himself. He had to go with the eddy, find the flourishing current once more. Shad hunted through the blackness for any sign of his sister, struggling to listen for any whisper at the back of his skull.

  Blood buffeted in his ears as his heart took on a new cadence, slowing, as if the tide of his pulse grew more idle.

  Of course, you dissolve and dissipate this way.

  He only barely realized he was holding his breath, with the abundant blue splashes streaked against the dark of his mind. Perspiration flowed and pooled at his collar as he fought to go deeper into himself. The cool coming back on, crafty and honey and invisible. Flux roaring on, towing him down the proper stream.

  Suffocating himself until he heard the word.

  Jonah.

  Shad fell back against the car seat, sucking air. He stuck his head out, letting the wind fill his ears. Pellets of sweat splashed onto the dirt.

  Sometimes you had to damn near die to find the next step on the path you had to take.

  Nothing ever changed except Mags was dead. Shad reminded himself, feeling the sweet lift that the rage provided him.

  He put the ’Stang into drive and headed for Gospel Trail Road, knowing that his enemy—whether the hills or the wraiths or someone hiding up there who also dreamed of blood—was waiting and smirking, urging him forward to meet at last, and mix their bad luck together into a new hellish brew.

  PART II

  The

  Jonah

  Chapter Eleven

  HE DROVE INTO THE MOUNTAINS ON THE BAD road, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness.

  Heading north to Jonah Ridge and the old train trestle, Shad kept trying to see it the way it had once been. A hundred years ago, in a different life, he might’ve brought Elfie Danforth up here to go a’courtin’, a picnic basket on his arm, with her parents following at a respectful distance behind them.

  But other scenes kept pushing in. Imagining how it must’ve been with the wagons carrying entire families up this way, dying from cholera or yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung onto the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life. Peace officers, doctors, and town fathers dragging their friends and neighbors up the trail. If only they’d trusted themselves enough to even attempt a quarantine, instead of carrying out their duties cold-heartedly. Driving up to the gorge to pitch their own kin off the cliffs.

  You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear. Even now, if he missed his chance and wound up a casualty in the bramble forest, he hoped Dave would have sense enough not to list it as a “death by misadventure.”

  Despite the ’Stang’s mass and power around him, his chest grew tight and his breath hitched. Already this journey was getting to him and he hadn’t even hit the outskirts of town. How the hell was he going to handle it on his own?

  He decided to park and take the trail up by foot. He thought maybe he’d spot something—or something might spot him—that could prove to be useful. If he didn’t ever come back down, he hoped Tub Gattling would discover the car, get the window fixed and help Pa find another buyer. At least Shad’s ghost wouldn’t be stuck in the backseat for eternity. You had to take what good fortune you could get.

  If he’d planned this pilgrimage through to the end, and if rationality held any small part of it, he would’ve packed a rucksack. Brought water and provisions, a flashlight, a compass. Shad looked back down the road at the ’Stang and wondered if he should use logic at all. He took a step toward the car and stopped, the chill wind patting him down like the hands of children.

  He realized then he could only follow his gut, his mama’s call, and Megan’s beckoning hand to show him the way. There was a feeling of abstinence to it, where he had to go in wearing only what was on his back. The purity of the act would have to carry him through.

  Shad worked his way up the rise toward high ground dense with oak hammocks and heavy underbrush, the willows bowing in the crosswinds coming over the precipice in the distance. On the other side he saw the squat arch of Scutt’s Peak as the sun broke bronzed and crimson around it.

  At a bend in the track he looked beyond the dark canopy of scrub and felt his attention being pulled toward the Pharisee. Did it prove that was the direction he should go? Or only that his enemy was much stronger than him and moving Shad blindly to his reckoning?

  He should’ve brought the dog. He felt more alone and uncomfortable here than in lockup after Jeffie O’Rourke got tossed in solitary for killing the warden.

  The woods closed in and solidified around him with the wild ash and birch drooping, the briar that could shred a man as badly as razor wire. The land was littered with shards of glass and flattened beer cans. You could see where the lover’s lane portion of the road came to an end. Even the horny kids knew not to go beyond a certain point. They cluttered their area and their tire tracks shredded the scrub. As if a line had been toed in the dirt and nobody went past where the fields ended and the thickets began.

  The terrain sloped into stands of knotted white and slash pine to the west, and the area diverged into more dirt paths leading into the black groves. Stands of spruce almost appeared blue in the rippling light. He’d traveled over a mile on foot when he finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail.

  Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. It was as clear and distinct to him now as it had been when the prison bus had brought him past the gate that first day.

  If there was murder waiting for him, it hadn’t shown itself yet.

  Tushie Kline had never fully understood the need for chapters in a book. It had been one element of reading that Shad had never been able to teach him. Tushie’s mind was set up to run from the beginning of a thing straight through to its end. He’d ask Shad at each break, “Where’d the story
go?” Always having trouble remembering that you had to turn the next page to find it again.

  “Where’s my story going now?” Shad said.

  He came to the divide and the Pharisee Bridge, the timber trestle that spanned a hundred yards across the gorge to Jonah Ridge.

  Bulldozers would’ve driven up Gospel Trail to push over the trees and clear ground for new track. Men tied by ropes would’ve dangled over the cliffs to hand-bore holes and set charges, pegged down so they wouldn’t blow away in the crosswinds. The pilings on which the trestle rested had been driven deep into the cliff rock on both sides. The rugged walls of the gorge bordered the Chatalaha River for over a mile here, where the waters broke into a series of long, violent rapids directly beneath. Shad looked at the wild forests on the other side of the ravine and felt like he was about to leave something behind forever.

  Gnarled firs twined along the path where the railroad ties and tracks had been uprooted. The torn and abandoned rails left behind a wake now heavy with gopher nests. The ties themselves had long since been ripped free and probably recycled farther south. Camps of men would’ve been strung through the hills, putting it all down, then tearing it back up again two decades later. Maybe the same workers, or their sons.

  Shad put his foot on the first rail and got an odd jounce of exhilaration from it.

  There were gaps in the tarred planks of the trestle, some only a couple of inches wide. The platform had rotted away by a half foot or more in some spots. You could stand here and imagine the highballing freight coming through at two in the morning, shaking up the mountains. The drunk miners would’ve come out here to play chicken, stand their ground as long as they could before diving aside. There was about twelve inches of safety space between the rail and the edge of the trestle itself.

  There was hardly any embankment at all on either slope, just a sheer drop down to the river and the pilings and support beams driven into the rocky sides of the cliffs.

  If you made a misstep now, you wouldn’t stop falling for more than half a mile. The hot-air drafts blowing up through the gorge would bounce you end over end and slow you down just enough that you wouldn’t croak from shock. You’d be awake and aware the whole ride down, thinking, holy fuck.