The Bastard Hand

by Heath Lowrance

  Forrey set his jaw, told us that he’d received a phone call from the Garrity’s maid less than an hour earlier. The servant, Louis, had been doing some repair work on one of the cars, and came in to find Kimberly Garrity slumped over the table in the kitchen, unmoving—he instructed the maid to call for help.

  All of us listened to Forrey in silence. What the Reverend thought, or what went on in the heads of Oldfield or Ishy, I couldn’t say.

  The Reverend said, “Gentlemen, I’d be honored to do anything I possibly can for Mrs. Garrity, now that I’m the official pastor of her church. If you’d be kind enough to let her know I’m at the disposal of her and her daughter.”

  Oldfield said, “I’m going by the Garrity house tonight to check on Elise, make sure everything’s all right. I’d be happy to deliver the message.”

  I said, “How did Miss Garrity get home?”

  Oldfield looked at me sideways. “Louis was outside. He drove her.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure she . . . got home okay.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Forrey said. “She’s always been a model of strength, that woman.”

  Hand shaking and patting of shoulders went all around, except for the mayor, who still hadn’t removed his right hand from his pocket. Ishy said, “Sorry your reception had to end this way, Reverend Childe. Perhaps we can make up for it Wednesday night.”

  “Hope to tell you. Although I think I’m going to write a new sermon, in light of this bad news. I hope to see you here, Mr. Mayor.”

  “Count on it,” Ishy said. He seemed less spacy now. Maybe his meds were wearing off.

  We saw the three of them out the back door, and yet another round of hand shaking ensued before they left. With his brand-new key, the Reverend locked the door behind them. He turned around and looked at me.

  The church was quiet again. The Reverend said, “Well, don’t that beat all.”

  “What?”

  “The Widow Garrity having a heart attack, at just about the same time as her son’s replacement arrives in town. If that ain’t the weirdest thing I ever heard, I don’t know what is!”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “I mean, what are the chances?” He shook his head in amazement. “What do you reckon caused it, anyway?”

  “How should I know? Besides, nothing has to cause it, right? She’s an old lady. Old ladies have heart attacks. Or break hips. Nothing weird about it.”

  He picked up on my unease, but misread it. Patting me on the shoulder, he said, “Don’t let it worry ya none, Charlie. I know you’re planning on bedding her daughter, and I wish you luck. This whole mess won’t set you back more than a couple days, if you handle it right.”

  “Why do you have to talk like that? I mean, Christ, did it ever occur to you that a woman might be more than just—”

  He cut me off, “I done asked you not to blaspheme, Charlie.”

  “Oh, give it a rest, Reverend.”

  His stare bore a hole right through my skull, but I held my ground and stared right back at him. After a moment his gaze relaxed, and he said, “Ah, hell, you’re right, Charlie. I should think more about your feelings. I apologize.” He held out his hand. “Friends?” he said.

  I hesitated. He grinned. Sighing, I took his hand and said, “Yeah. Okay. And, uh . . . I guess I’m sorry about blaspheming.”

  He shrugged. “You don’t gotta apologize to me about it. That’s between you and the Man Upstairs. You know what this calls for? What we really need right now?”

  “What?”

  He clapped his hands together, and his eyes gleamed. “A drink!” he said.

  We roared down Park, and the park gave way to nice suburban homes and warm green lawns and wood fences, and then the suburbs thinned out to middle-class ranches and lower middle-class bungalows. The lane degenerated into a rough street that degenerated into a dirt road, just as the forests around Cuba Landing asserted themselves and the only signs of human life were the occasional shacks and garages half-hidden behind dappled green and brown.

  The car windows were open and a gust of wind whistled through the car and I caught that smell again, that smell of wildflowers and cool moss and kudzu. The Reverend’s hair whipped in the wind. In the dull shaft of our headlights, the road ahead began twisting and snaking. I could feel the incline as we neared the Hill, apparent in the motor’s whine more than anything else. He took the curves and twists with zeal, and for the moment our conversation was on hold.

  Finally we slowed down and pulled off onto the slippery gravel on the side of the road. The Malibu sighed. The Reverend yanked up the emergency brake and said, “We walk from here.”

  I jumped out after him, and immediately stumbled on the loose gravel and nearly fell down the incline into the lush patches of kudzu below. I grabbed the door handle and righted myself.

  “Mind your step. That kudzu’s just crawling with mean-ass snakes.”

  I glanced down at the suddenly sinister leafy vines. “Are there lots of snakes around here?”

  “Hell, yes. This is snake central, Charlie. ’specially this time of night.” Grinning, so I didn’t know if he was kidding. Then he said, “It’s this way,” and trotted off to the other side of the road and disappeared into the woods.

  I hurried after him in the dark. The spot he’d evaporated into, when I got up close, revealed itself to be a small opening. A rough path cut through the woods and headed up Moker’s Hill.

  “Hurry up, Charlie! It ain’t far.”

  I took the path after him and caught up. His broad black shadow moved ahead of me, swift and confident with every step. How he’d found this trail in the first place was a mystery—his nose must have sniffed out the scent of shine—but how he was able to traverse it with such ease was even more remarkable. I kept stumbling over stray limbs and half-buried tree roots. After only a few minutes, I was breathing hard and sweating in the cool forest breeze.

  He chattered on the whole way, but I was too busy fumbling through the dark and watching for snakes to pay any attention. Whenever we came near a cluster of kudzu I steered a wide berth and inevitably stumbled against a tree. In my mind, every leaf or weed that tickled against my ankle had fangs.

  The trail wound upward, getting steeper and steeper, until it all leveled out at once and we came out of the woods into a big clearing. The Aarons brothers cabin pressed right against the borders of nature and didn’t even make a dent.

  The cabin was nicer than I thought it would be, crafted with long slabs of timber and a sturdy, level porch. Gold light flickered through the fairly modern-looking windows.

  A figure appeared on the porch as we came out of the woods. The unmistakable cha-chunk of a shotgun being cocked echoed across the clearing.

  The Reverend halted so suddenly that I stumbled right into him. The figure on the porch spoke in a voice like a rusty chainsaw: “Move one more step an’ I’ll use yer ass fer hamburger meat.”

  “Henry,” the Reverend said, “it’s me. Reverend Childe.”

  I caught my breath while the figure on the porch moved down two steps on the stairs. I couldn’t see the shotgun, lost in the bulk of the figure’s shadow, but I knew it was still trained on us.

  “Reverend Childe?”

  “That’s right, Henry. Remember, I said I’d come calling tonight?”

  Henry didn’t relax. “Who that with you?”

  “This here’s Charlie. My assistant? ’member, I told you ’bout him?”

  “You didn’t say nothing ’bout bringing no one with you.”

  “It’s just Charlie. Nothin’ to worry about. Say howdy to the man, Charlie.”

  “Howdy,” I said.

  Henry Aarons growled, “You shudda said something, Reverend, if you was gonna bring someone.” Then, almost like he was reciting a mantra, “We don’t like strangers.”

  The Reverend put up his hand. “Henry, you have my word as a Man a’ God that Charlie here is A-okay. Ain’t nothing to worr
y about.”

  Henry said, “Shee-it. You ain’t any more a Man a’ Gawd than I am. Just cuz you wearin’ a collar don’t mean I won’t make a sieve outta yer head.”

  “I know, Henry, I know.”

  Another figure came out of the cabin onto the porch, said, “What the holy hell’s going on out here? Reverend, that you?”

  “Howdy, Mack,” the Reverend said. “I’d come up to shake your hand, ’cept your brother here’s got me covered and all.”

  “Who that with you?”

  “It’s my assistant, Charlie. Criminy, boys, what the hell’s with you? I told ya I was coming, I told ya about Charlie, and I get here it’s like trying to get inside the damn Pentagon or something.”

  “The damn what?” Henry said.

  Mack came down the stairs, said, “The Pentagon, Henry. Some tourist thing they got over in Greece.” He approached us and eyed me suspiciously and I finally got a look at one of the Aarons brothers.

  Ugly, the first thing that came to mind. But ugly is such a small and subjective word, it really didn’t do justice to the exquisite disaster of Mack Aarons’s face. It was the kind of ugly that went to the bone.

  Runny, deep-set eyes, almost lost under the shadow of his mammoth forehead, and a thick mouth that took up half his face. His nose swollen and red with broken capillaries. He spoke to me: “What’d you say yer name is?”

  “Charlie,” I said.

  Mack laughed gutturally. “Charlie. Look, Henry, it’s Charlie.”

  They both laughed, and Henry said, “Charlie! What kinda stupid-ass name is Charlie?”

  Henry stepped forward to slap me on the shoulder, and I learned that, yes, someone actually could be uglier than Mack Aarons. He said, “Ah, hell, boy, you all right. You fellas come on in.”

  He and Mack started back into the cabin. The Reverend hung back long enough to whisper under his breath, “Damn nutcases, Charlie. The things a fella has to do to get a drink.”

  I whispered back, “We could always just go to the bar, you know.”

  “Lord have mercy,” the Reverend said. We followed the brothers into the cabin.

  “A man,” said Henry, “has gotta have some kinda redemption.”

  “Amen,” said Mack.

  “Amen,” said the Reverend.

  They all looked at me. I had the jug to my lips. Choking down the white-hot shine, I made a strange noise, set the jug in front of me, and croaked, “Amen!” The liquor ran down my chin.

  No one seemed to care. Henry nodded wisely and said, “That’s why we got the cross there on the wall. Redemption. I don’t reckon that what me and Mack do is a sin or nothing—if I thought it was a sin, why, I wouldn’t do it—but it never hurts to be on the safe side. If what we do here offends the Lord in some way, then we sorta got all our bases covered, if you know what I mean.”

  The Reverend said, “I do indeed, Henry. I do indeed.”

  “And,” Henry added, “judging from you, Reverend, I reckon I was right. It ain’t no sin. If’n it was, you wouldn’t be partaking, wouldja now?”

  “No, Henry, I surely wouldn’t.”

  Mack said, with only a touch of hostility, “But there again, Reverend Childe ain’t exactly typical a’ his calling.”

  We all drank in silence for a moment, none of us knowing how to respond to that. It was the third time we’d fallen into silence in the last hour. Each time had been proceeded by Mack saying something hostile.

  Most of the night’s conversation, not surprisingly, had centered on religion, but the natural flow of talk had revealed quite a bit about the brothers. That they were dumber than I had ever imagined became clearer all the time. They used the word “nigger” a lot, but strangely their use of the word went far beyond derogatory references to black people. Everyone they didn’t like, black or white or Asian or whatever, was a nigger. And that was a very long list. Most of the night, I could see them trying to figure out if I was a nigger, too.

  They’d grown up in Cuba Landing, the sons of a sharecropper who spent most of his time drunk. When their mother died, thirty years before, the sharecropper had taken his sons and built this cabin far away from the hustle and bustle of life in the Big City. Cuba Landing, that is. They lived off the land—their diet consisted mainly of meat they caught themselves—and made money selling shine to other towns in the county.

  Their father taught them how to make shine. He taught them many things. How to fend for themselves, how to use guns, how to kill and prepare an animal for consumption. He taught them about the Bible. But mostly he taught them the ins-and-outs of paranoia. He taught them that the niggers would get them if they didn’t watch out.

  That paranoia was weaved in with their faith in the Bible. Equal doses of Christianity and a phobia of all humanity, with a dash of child-like superstition. At one point in the evening, Henry said something about the possibility of G-men coming to arrest them, and Mack rapped hard on the wood table for luck, crossed himself, said, “They’d have to plug up their bullet holes first, the damn dirty niggers.”

  As the evening wore on, and we all got drunker and drunker, religion came up more and more often, and Mack started getting hostile. He was one of those kinds of drunks, the kind that makes you think a fight is just inevitable if someone doesn’t pass out first.

  I used the occasional tense silences to gaze around the home of the Aarons brothers. It wasn’t what I thought it would be. For one thing, it was amazingly neat and clean, essentially one giant room, sparsely furnished with only the table we sat at and two beds along each wall, made up with military precision. Along the wall to the right, a small refrigerator and a sink and a stove. On the table before us, next to the jug we drank from, a half-done wooden carving, not near enough to completion yet to tell what it was.

  But none of those things leaped right out at you when you first entered the cabin. The first thing you noticed was the metal contraption near the far wall, pumping and steaming and making a noise like a grade school science project. Jugs and bottles, some of them full and others waiting to be filled, lined up neatly in front of the still.

  After you noticed the still, your eye moved naturally upward, to the wall behind it. And there hung the gigantic cross, the one Henry had been referring to. Not quite as big as the one in the church, but it gave the impression of being bigger because of the relative size of the room. It must’ve been nearly seven feet tall; it’s base touched the floor and the very top of it came above my head. The Aarons brothers had left the wood grain showing, but lacquered it carefully and expertly, so that the steam from the still gathered on the wood and made it look like it was sweating divine inspiration.

  Very impressive work.

  The only complaint anyone could’ve had about the cabin was the smell. As neat as it was, the stench of humanity hung in the air—or rather, the stench of the Aarons brothers. Obviously, they didn’t take bathing as seriously as they took housekeeping, and every corner of the cabin was infected with their body odor. I figured I’d get used to the smell after a few minutes, but I’d figured wrong. I was still very conscious of it. Looking on the bright side, though, I was sort of glad about that—not the sort of odor you’d like to grow accustomed to.

  But the bad smell wasn’t on my mind at that moment. Mack stared at the Reverend, waiting for a response. Testing his tolerance for abuse.

  The Reverend had managed to defuse the tension each time with a disarming smile or a witty comment directed at the Aarons brothers level. But I could tell he was getting fed up. Mack had made a personal attack on him this time, and he couldn’t let it go.

  Taking up the jug, the Reverend eased the uncomfortable silence by confronting it head-on. “Well, Mack, I reckon you’re right about that. I ain’t exactly typical in my approach to saving souls. But that’s the way the Good Lord made me, and I’m damned if I’m willing to go against His plan.”

  Henry said, “Now, Reverend, Mack don’t mean no—”

  “That’s all right, Henry.
I know what your brother’s getting at. And I don’t hold it against him none. It’s just a little misunderstanding, and I’m trying to clear it up best I can. See,” he turned his attention back to the younger Aarons, “we’re in the End Times now, Mack. You knew that, I reckon. The Book of Revelation tells us that things is gonna be all fucked up in the Final Days. What appears to be wrong will be right, and what appears to be right will be just dead-wrong.”

  “I don’t getcha,” Mack said.

  The Reverend took another swig from the jug, leaned in closer to Mack. I could see the fire of alcohol in his eyes, the flush on his cheeks. When he spoke again, his voice was barely a whisper. “And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and said to the mountains and rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of his wrath is come; and . . . who shall be able to stand?’ ”

  All three of us stared at him. There was a vague terror etched on the ugly faces of the Aarons brothers. I didn’t really follow what the Reverend was talking about, but the fear that permeated the room touched me slightly and I picked up the jug and had a swallow.

  Henry stammered, “Revelation, 6:15, 16, and 17. Right?”

  The Reverend grinned; not the boyish, charming grin, but a grin straight out of Hell. “That’s right, Henry. That’s very good. You know your scripture pretty well. But quoting scripture don’t mean a damn thing unless you know what it means. Do you know what it means, Henry?”

  “Well . . . it means . . . it means, like, when the end comes, ain’t nobody . . . no one’s gonna be safe.”

  The Reverend slammed his fist down on the table, hard, and all of us jumped. “Wrong!” he shouted. “That’s just wrong! You think a good, God-fearing man’s got anything to be worried about? Bullshit! Folks like you and me, we’ll be walking with the Lamb on that fine day!” He said again, “Who shall be able to stand? Not the great men, oh brothers, not them. They gonna fall. Not those kings and captains and great men we put all our faith in. And you know why they gonna fall? Because they don’t know shit. They don’t know about God’s Truth. It’s the End Times, and in the End Times, God’s gonna have a different word to give. And to the ears of everyone who’s scared, everyone whose hearts are filled with the Devil, that word is gonna sound wrong. It’s even gonna sound blasphemous. But it’s the true word, brothers, and I got it. I heard it, and I’m giving it to you now.”