He didn’t like her tone and walked in without waiting to hear her bidding. The place had lost the hallowed essence that he’d sensed before. The stink of marijuana filled the room. His skin grew clammy and he began to cough uncontrollably. After a minute he checked the window and saw the first patterns of snow emerging in the sky.
Huddled in her chair, M’am Luvell sat wearing only a silk slip, smoking her pipe. The hex woman was sweating even as the temperature dropped. It made him giggle and shake his head. You couldn’t get away from the backass contradictions of this town.
Beside her, set on a table his father had built, stood the old man’s chessboard. They were in midgame, which might have taken days or weeks.
Uncovered from all her sweaters and blankets, M’am’s dwarf body still showed that timeless quality she had. She looked as much like a girl as she did a hag, and the ambiguity struck him as something curious and creepy and very funny.
“You see more of my bare flesh and you get the giggles, boy? Another lady would be shamed and disgraced.”
“But not you.”
It made her cackle. Threads of smoke clung to her teeth. “Take a sight more than that, I reckon.”
“So do I, especially since I wasn’t laughing at you.”
“But you were. At the fact that I get me the sweats in weather like this. I guess it is a sight.”
Like there was nothing else to talk about than how fascinating a seminude dwarf witchy woman might be.
“You made it back alive,” she said. “You should be proud of that. Not many people go up the bad road and come back again. People like us, that is.”
“And who are the people like us?” he asked.
“Those who got special consideration under the Lord.”
“Is that what you call it?”
“Sit on the bed. I’m gonna care for your wounds.”
She clambered down from her seat and moved about the shack, so small and familiar with the place that even at her age she somehow managed to scurry. More like a small animal skittering around the place, like something you’d chase after with a broom and set traps for.
He lay back on the bed and watched her brew tea. For a few minutes he slept, and when he woke she had cleaned his belly and the cuts on his scalp. She’d wrapped a cloth around his neck soaked in a cooling fluid. The tea tasted worse than he would’ve guessed but he immediately felt more alert.
After he sat up, she immediately returned to her seat and began smoking again.
“I heard what you said outside,” she told him. “Don’t you worry none on the death of your friend. It’s December. It’s a time meant for dying.”
“So why didn’t I?”
“Considering the size of the bruises on your throat and the hole in your guts, you’re lucky you didn’t. Then again, December ain’t over just yet.” She let out a spurt of cackling that went on for too long.
“I thought you were supposed to ease my mind.”
“I can only do so much.”
“Well, feel free to start whenever you like.”
“She’s with child,” M’am Luvell said, her forehead misted with perspiration. “Your woman, if that’s who she be. That Elfie Danforth.”
It got the heat flowing back through his veins again, and the rage that had abandoned him bucked once, like an engine trying to turn over.
Was this all he was good for? Being baited and toyed with? To what goddamn end? “And you learned that when I was with her only last night?”
M’am sucked on the pipe loudly, holding the smoke in her lungs until her lips fluttered, then letting it out. “Oh, the baby ain’t yours. She been with a lot of other fellas since you been away. I don’t rightly think she knows who the daddy is. But her mama come in here to get some Black Haw jam, and that takes the morning sickness off.”
Now Elfie and her Ma could sit back together on their Uninterrupted Airflow Pillows late at night and order off the shopping channel. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.
“Even if it’s true, why are you telling me?”
“You mentioned her while you slept. It weighs on your mind that you might have a child born in the hollow. But that baby, it’s a girl, she won’t be yours.”
He let out a long sigh and drew the chill rag from around his neck. “Did you really think that would make me feel better?”
“Boy, it’s my aim to get you on to where you need to go, not to make you spin cartwheels for joy. Did you find what you were after on Gospel Trail Road?”
“No.”
“Then you ain’t done with what you got to do.”
“I know that.”
“You might never be.”
Shad stared at her. “Old woman, are you ever going to tell me anything helpful?”
M’am Luvell tilted her chin and considered on that for a while, nodding as the smoke writhed in the air. “I reckon not.”
“Then shut the hell up!”
“It’s only gonna get worse for you now.”
“You’re as crazy as the rest of them.”
She broke into that wild laughter again that sounded like bones clashing and crushing together, and even after he walked from the shack past his father and the girl, with Lament now loping beside him, the noise followed and managed to drown out the shrieking croaks of the deranged, dying bullfrogs.
THE ’STANG WAS ALL YOU COULD COUNT ON.
He drove into the mountains with Lament in the passenger seat, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness. Where Dave Fox had gingerly placed it after killing her, leaving Megan there alone for hours while he drove around the town as if searching for her.
It began to snow.
He could feel the breath of the two dead guys in the backseat on his hackles. Lament felt it too and started giving sidelong glances, snapping at emptiness.
When Shad parked, Lament hopped out and gazed north along the trail. It took a while for Shad to limp that far. They hiked up and stood where the wagons had unloaded families dying from cholera and yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung from the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life.
You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear.
The dead knew something about life that the living didn’t. They knew how it ended.
Lament chased the snowflakes and rolled happily in the mud. He kept trying to get Shad to chase him. Slowly they worked up the rise toward the dense oak and slash pine, with the willows bowing to the ground, beaten in the crosswinds coming across the precipice.
The woods continued to close in as they walked. They finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail Road.
Thousands of feet below, the Chatalaha River boiled at the bottom of the gorge.
Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. You did what you could to stay sane and strong from one moment to the next, but it was never quite enough.
“Where’s my story going now?” Shad asked, and Lament began to whine and nervously turn in circles.
The movement beneath the turnings of the world climbed toward him. Something reached for Shad’s ankle, tightened on him, and began to yank him down. He wondered if he was strong enough to resist. He held for a moment, then started to slide over the edge. It felt powerful enough to be Dave’s fist.
The suicides didn’t sleep. Lament barked and lunged and squealed. Shad grabbed for the dog. We have to
