The Line That Held Us

by David Joy

  “What are y’all doing here?”

  “Michael came by the house this morning,” Mrs. Moody said. “He mentioned he was on his way to drop something off at Coon Coward’s and I told him I’d been meaning to get over there since his sister passed. Figured I might as well get out of the house for a bit. I need to get out of that house.” She shook her head and squeezed at the bridge of her nose. “I keep going through all of Darl’s stuff, going through pictures. I’m driving myself crazy, Calvin. I needed to get out of that house. So I told him if it was all right I’d like to ride with him.”

  Calvin waited on Stillwell to answer.

  “I was planning on coming to see you afterward and Mrs. Moody said that it was all right to come by here first, to just go on and stop in.”

  “There’s something about seeing you that makes it a little better,” Mrs. Moody said. “Sitting in that house all day, all I keep thinking is how alone I am. Marla’s come by with the kids and that’s been nice, but I needed to get out of there. Seeing folks helps. And I haven’t had a chance to thank you. I know how hard that was. What I asked.” Her voice broke off. “I know how hard that must’ve been, but it’s like it’s always been here. You carry your own. Darl and you, the two of you might as well have been brothers.”

  Calvin wiped his hands on the shop towel again and tossed it onto a small shelf that ran the wall to the left, the wood scattered with tools and spent quarts of oil and a small black radio with its silver antenna stretched toward the rafters. The smell of rain filled the shed. He looked at Mrs. Moody and saw the same strength she’d always carried, a strength that hardened into something almost impenetrable after her husband passed. For as tough as the men were in these mountains, the women had always been stone. They were used to loss, accustomed to never having enough. They were fit for the harshness of this world. Calvin could feel all of that in her right then and he was almost jealous of her for that. He turned to Stillwell to focus. “So what brings you by?”

  “The reason I’ve got to go by Mr. Coward’s is that he brought me some pictures off a game camera he had out in the woods, and now that I’ve had the chance to look through them I needed to return the card.”

  “All right.”

  “Mr. Coward was out of town for a little over a week after his sister passed, and when he came back he checked the camera and there were some pictures on there of Darl going in and out every evening,” Stillwell said. “He thought they might be helpful.”

  “I don’t know how that’d be helpful, but okay.”

  “There were two pictures there at the end of someone going into the woods with Darl and helping him carry something out, and when I got to looking, it was you.”

  Calvin didn’t know what to say, but he nodded his head in agreement.

  “I thought you might be able to tell me what y’all were doing?”

  Calvin glanced over at Mrs. Moody and she was looking at him the same way she’d done when he and Darl were kids, and he’d never been able to lie to her then and it was hard to imagine deceiving her now. He turned to the detective. “Darl was in there hunting.”

  “Okay.”

  “He knew Coon was out of town, I guess, and there’s this buck he’s seen going in and out of there for years and I reckon he figured it was as good a chance as he’d ever have. But like I said, I don’t know how in the world that’s helpful.”

  “So, is that what y’all were carrying out of there? That buck?”

  “No,” Calvin said. He shook his head. “I don’t guess Darl ever did see that deer. But he shot a good doe way back in a cove at the far end of Coon’s land, and he asked me to help him drag.”

  “That don’t sound like Darl,” Mrs. Moody said.

  Calvin looked at her and could see the disappointment smeared across her face, and seeing that made him hate Stillwell for bringing her there, hate him for making her think one sour thing about her son. She’d had enough pain in her life already, and Darl had only been in the ground five days.

  “Going in there while Coon was out of town. That don’t sound like Darl.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Calvin said. He looked at her and tried to smile to get her to realize that Darl going in there was perfectly in character. “You know as good as I do how much he loved hunting. Hell, that’s all he ever thought about. Every winter it was playing around with those rabbit boxes and come spring it was turkeys. All summer it was chasing speckleds, and as soon as there came a bite in the air he wanted to be up in a treestand. God he loved hunting deer. I think he’d have lived in the woods like an Indian if he could’ve.” Calvin chortled and watched her expression ease. “He’d been after that deer a long time, Mrs. Moody. Way he told it, it was the biggest thing he’d ever seen come out of Jackson County. And you know him, one way or another he was going to do his damnedest to get him. That’s just how he was. Whatever he was after had to be the biggest and the baddest or it didn’t interest him.”

  Mrs. Moody nodded her head and grinned solemnly. They all stood there for a few moments without saying a word and in time something seemed to change on her face, as if her question was answered.

  “When you going to ask that girl in there to marry you?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said. He looked at the ground and kicked at the dust with the toe of his boot before meeting her eyes.

  “She’s a keeper,” Mrs. Moody said.

  Calvin put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and nodded.

  “Was that her mama and daddy that was standing behind you at the service?”

  “It was.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Moody said. “Says an awful lot about how highly they think of you that they were there. That ought to mean something to you, Calvin. It means something to me.”

  She eyed him seriously and he found it hard to look at her right then.

  “You know Marla’s going to have another one,” Mrs. Moody said. “Another little girl. Next April. That’ll make five.” She shook her head and came as close to smiling as her heart would allow. “Raising a brood, I’m telling you. It was bad enough with them three boys. Winking, Blinking, and Nod, that’s what I call them, like those little birds Opie raised that time on Andy Griffith. Hellions is what they are. Don’t know if they’re keeping me young or killing me. A few more and I’ll open up a daycare.”

  “You ought to go in there and see Angie before you leave.” He looked through the rain at a small screened-in porch off the back of the house. Mrs. Moody came forward and pulled down on his shoulder and he lowered his head and let her kiss him on the cheek the way she had every time they said goodbye since he was five or six years old.

  “You come by the house and see me,” she said. “I’ve got some things I want to give you. Some things I think you might like to have.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Calvin said. “I will.”

  When she walked into the rain, there was no hurry in her step. She held her hands against her head to keep the plastic tight over her hair, and when she was up the back steps, Calvin turned to Stillwell.

  “You got a lot of nerve bringing her over here.”

  “She told you. She wanted to ride over to Mr. Coward’s with me. That’s it.”

  “That’s horse shit. They don’t live two miles apart. You had to pass his house to get here. So don’t tell me this is about giving her a lift over there.”

  “Then what is it, Calvin?”

  “You brought her over here to see if you could get a rise out of me.”

  “And did I?”

  “Fuck you, Michael.” Calvin stepped face-to-face with him and prodded his finger into Stillwell’s chest to punctuate his words. Calvin was a few inches shorter and he tilted his head up so they were eye to eye. “If you didn’t have that badge on your belt right now, I’d whoop your ass. I’m telling you, if it wasn’t for the badge,
I’d bust your nose like when we was kids.”

  In their glory days at Smoky Mountain High, he and Stillwell had both asked Carla Mathis to prom and she said yes to Calvin. That afternoon on the baseball field, Stillwell beaned him once at batting practice and Calvin let it slide. But when Stillwell clipped his legs out from under him with a fastball as he dug back into the box, Calvin stormed the mound and beat him senseless, the coaches rushing out to pull them apart like dogs.

  “Your eye’s healed up,” Stillwell said.

  Calvin didn’t answer.

  “You know the blood came back from the house,” Stillwell said. “It was Darl’s.”

  “And who the hell else’s would it have been?”

  “Didn’t know.”

  “Look, if you’ve got something you want to ask me, then come right out and ask it. That’s the least you can do. Come over here and ask.” Calvin backed away and snatched an oil filter wrench from the shelf. “But don’t you put no more on that woman there than she’s already got. Her son ain’t been in the ground a week. You hear me?”

  Stillwell didn’t nod or speak.

  “That woman’s carried a lot more than her share in her lifetime and I be damned if I sit back and watch some son of a bitch like you shovel more on her. You do it again, and I’ll go to the sheriff,” Calvin said. “Him and my daddy’s been friends a long time, and when I tell him you brought her over here like you did, you know that ain’t going to sit well with him.”

  Silence held between them and Calvin widened his eyes to demand an answer. Finally, Stillwell nodded. Calvin started to climb back under the truck to get back to work.

  “You know Dwayne Brewer?”

  “What?”

  “Dwayne Brewer.”

  “No, I heard you,” Calvin said. “I’m just trying to figure out why you’re asking me if I know him.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Of course I do,” Calvin said. “Most everybody in this county knows him, or knows of him. We went to school with his brother. You know that.”

  Calvin could tell Stillwell was trying to read his reaction, but he didn’t say another word, didn’t offer a hint of why he asked that question.

  “What are you saying? You think Dwayne Brewer did it?”

  “It was just a question.” Stillwell scratched at the back of his head and took a can of dip from his pocket. He shoved his lip full of tobacco and brushed what fell from the front of his gray polo. “I don’t have a whole lot to go on here. There’s been a whole lot of crazy things happen in this county through the years, but the one thing that always seems to hold true is that the one who winds up guilty was usually close. Around here a man’s a whole lot more likely to kill his cousin than he is to wander down the road and kill somebody he don’t know.”

  “So what are you saying?” Calvin sat on the ground with arms draped over his knees.

  “I’m saying if you think of anything, you give me a call, all right?”

  “All right,” Calvin said. He lay on his back and scooted under the truck.

  “You got my number.”

  Stillwell walked out of the shed and into the rain. He splashed through puddles in the yard and up the back steps, the screen door slapping shut behind him. Calvin took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled against the undercarriage. Hearing that name had almost dropped him to his knees. He was scared to death knowing how close Stillwell was, but there was nothing he could do. What hung over his head could come crashing down any minute. There was no way to know when it all might fall to pieces.

  NINETEEN

  Dwayne Brewer swung the iron door open for light so that he could see what was left of his brother. Standing there in the mouth of the root cellar, he felt the darkened room breathe against him, the smell a growing thing that had worsened since he last came. He took shallow breaths to keep from gagging and staggered inside carrying a heavy bag of lime over one shoulder and a tattered Bible in his hand. “You stink, brother,” he said as he set the bag by Sissy’s feet.

  Carol’s skin was no longer bloated and tight. Over the course of that past week it collapsed and liquefied into an almost creamy consistency, the greenish-black of pond water. All of the fluids drained from his body into a puddle around him. His skin seemed to be ripping itself apart, splitting open and seeping black.

  Kneeling beside Sissy’s body, he dug their father’s knife from deep in his brother’s pocket and opened the sodbuster. He sliced a wide smile at the top of the heavy paper sack and tossed handfuls of lime onto the body like he was sowing seed. When a thin layer dusted Carol’s clothes and flesh, Dwayne collapsed onto the dirt and leaned against a heavy pitched column with his legs hugged to his chest. Outside, leaves drifted about in a rust-colored clatter that rasped the ground as the wind came through the valley. Flies buzzed around his face and he swatted them away only to watch them light on his brother. Dwayne couldn’t bear to look.

  It was the fourth Sunday he’d spent without him, and that was the day that was hardest. Their grandparents had been greatly religious, and growing up he and Sissy spent most Sundays listening to their grandfather read scripture with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses propped on the edge of his nose in the front room of the shack where he lived. In summer, he’d take them on the road to tent revivals that sprang up in remote hollers, and when they were with him, they were safe. Maybe it was that being safe that made the words stick, but either way Dwayne Brewer had read the King James cover to cover a hundred times if he’d read it once.

  Despite being believers, he and Sissy were never ones for church, for sanctuaries or the people who filled their pews. They’d tried once after their grandfather was gone. When the bell rang in that tiny white church along the stream, they walked right up to the front row so that they’d be close to the words. The preacher kept cutting eyes toward them through the opening prayer and they could hear folks whispering behind them. They didn’t know any different, had never been before, so they didn’t find it strange. The preacher was about to deliver his message when Dwayne felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He looked up and one of the ushers, a red-faced man with bloodshot cattle eyes, leaned down and whispered in his ear that he’d like them to come with him. Dwayne told his brother and Sissy whispered, “Why?” and Dwayne told him he didn’t have the foggiest, but up they stood and down the aisle they went.

  When they were at the back of the church, the usher opened his arm to a pew along the back wall. Dwayne told him he didn’t understand and the man explained that he and his brother were making some of the people in the church nervous, that maybe it’d be best if they sat there at the back. That old familiar feeling found him right then and he latched on to that man’s throat and squeezed till his eyes got buggy. People were turning around in the pews, men standing up and coming toward him, and Dwayne could see them out of the corners of his eyes, but he didn’t care, he couldn’t wait to explode when they were on him. All of a sudden he could feel someone patting him on the back, the nasally voice of his brother saying, “Maybe we ought to go, Dwayne. Maybe we ought to get out of here.” Something about his brother’s voice stopped him. He let go of that man right before the others reached him and he and his brother trudged out of there without so much as a word.

  A few weeks later they were driving down the road and Dwayne saw on the church sign a message that read: GOD RECRUITS FROM THE PIT NOT THE PEDESTAL. He had guffawed at the thought, shaking his head as they passed, thinking, You don’t know a goddamn thing about it.

  He was staring at the soles of his brother’s boots in a sort of illusory trance. “I was thinking yesterday morning about a passage in Isaiah,” Dwayne said, as he opened his Bible across his knees. “Figured I’d read that this morning, if that’s all right with you.” He paused. “What it says is this. It says . . .”

  Dwayne began to read the passage, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, which told of C
hrist being born not to kings, but to nothing, a tender plant rooted in dry ground. It was from there that He came to know suffering, the grieving and sorrow of sin.

  “He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth: He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not his mouth . . . And He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in His death; because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth.”

  Dwayne thought of his brother and he thought of Christ and he could see no difference between. Both had been born at the bottom, their burden the weight of the wicked. Sin be the thorns in His head, the nails in His hands and feet, the spear in His side. Sin be the spit on Carol’s face, the ridicule of poverty, the beatings, the torment of silence. It pleased the Lord to bruise them, to put their hearts to grief, for only through that suffering, through bearing the sin of many, could they make open the doors for those who had done them harm.

  When he’d finished reading the chapter, Dwayne slapped the book closed. He tossed it into the dirt beside him, a poof of dust rising from the floor. He looked up with a tremendous smile and said, “Brother, you are like Jesus.”

  The room was still and in that stillness was a low static that sounded like crumpled newspaper. The noise came from his brother. Sissy whispered something Dwayne couldn’t make out from where he sat and he turned his head to the side to listen closely. The sound was still too low to make out, barely audible but constant. He gaped wide-eyed at his brother’s face, Sissy’s lips seeming to quiver, and watched in amazement, as what he’d been praying seemed to be happening right before his eyes. When he was a boy, he had an aunt who could stop blood, who could read a verse from the Bible and stop blood from leaving a body. Her name was Opal and she could blow the thrush from a baby’s throat by breathing into its mouth. There was a magic to this world. Dwayne had seen it. And right then he was sure he would see it again.

  From where he sat, he couldn’t make out the words and so he crawled closer and leaned his ear to his brother’s lips. A whir of blowflies round as nickels circled their faces and lit on Dwayne’s shoulders and back. He stared at his brother’s arms where reddish-brown mites the size of pinheads scuttled over black skin, tiny eggs scattered over him like mustard seeds. The ground around him was pulsing with life, dull brown beetles, some iridescently green, centipedes spiraled like ammonites. The sound was low and constant, but he could not make out the words, and Dwayne leaned away so that he could read his brother’s lips. That’s when he saw it, a wriggling mass that moved as a cream-colored tongue, a single syllable broken into a thousand moving parts. The sight of it caught in Dwayne’s throat and he ran his finger into his brother’s mouth, scooping out all that he could. He slung his hand and the flies droned around him.