Mystery Walk

'No.'

The word stopped him as if he'd been struck, but his clownish grin stayed hooked in place. His eyes were so bloodshot they looked as if they were about to burst. 'Awwww, don't be like that,' he said. 'Jus' been out howwwwwlin', that's all. Saw Mack van Horn and old Wint, too; you'd never believe that damn still they got workin' way back in the woods!' He blinked and ran a grimy hand across his forehead. 'Where'd that mule go after he kicked me in the head?' He laughed, his eyes wanting to close on him. 'Why don't you go on back there and comb your hair real lice and pretty, huh? Put on some of that sweet-smellin' stuff I like. Then you can welcome me home like a real wife. . . .'

'You're filthy,' Ramona said quiedy, 'and you smell like an outhouse!'

'DAMN RIGHT!' he thundered, his face contorting with anger. 'What'd you expect, that I'd come home with roses in my hair? You made me wallow in shit at that tent revival, woman, and I thought I'd jus' bring a little of it home!' He was trembling with rage. 'You made a fool out of me,' he said. 'You disgraced my name, woman! Oh, you planned it all, didn't you? That's why you wanted to go all of a sudden, 'cause you figured you could raise some kind of sin at the revival! And I had to stand there while you . . . !' He stumbled over his words and stopped, because Billy had come out of the gray shadows at Ramona's back and stood there watching.

'Billy,' John said. 'Son. You daddy's back home now. I know I look a mess, but . . . but I had an accident, I guess.'

'Go get your clothes on,' Ramona told the boy. 'Hurry.'

Billy stared at his father, his face crumpling, and then went to get ready.

'What's goin' on?'

Ramona said, 'I'm taking Billy to his grandmother.'

'Oh.' It was a soft, stunned exhalation of moonshined breath; John wavered on his feet, the room beginning to spin slowly around him. He felt strangled for a second and couldn't find his voice. Then: 'Now I see it. Nowwwwww I see it. Gonna take my son away from me when my back's turned, ain't you?' He advanced a step, and Ramona saw the glint of red in his eyes behind the soft flabby drunkenness.

'No, that's not it.' She stood her ground. 'You know why I'm doing this. ...'

'So you can make him like you are!' he shrieked. 'So you can put all that . . . that shit in his head! I won't let you do it, by God! I won't let you have him!'

'Billy saw some part of Will Booker that was left after death, John. Call it a haunt, or a spirit, or maybe even the soul. But he did see something in that basement, and he has to understand what's ahead for him. . . .'

'NO!' John staggered backward, almost falling, and splayed himself across the door as if nailed there. 'I won't let him be taken over by that blasphemy! Maybe I had to stand by and watch you do it, but I won't—I WON'T—let you take my blood into it!'

'Your blood?' she asked him softly. 'He's my blood too. He's got both of us in him, but the old Choctaw blood in him is strong, John. He's the next link in the chain, don't you see? He has to carry it f —'

He clapped his hands to his ears. 'Evil evil evil evil evil ...'

Tears burned around Ramona's eyes at the sight of the pitiful drunken man, pressed frantically against the door of his own house to keep Billy in. 'It's not evil, John. It never was.'

'You tell me death's not evil? That's been your life, 'mona! Not me or the boy, not really! It's always been death, and ghosts, and demons!' He shook his head, his senses reeling. 'Oh God have mercy on your soul! God have mercy on my soul for puttin' up with your lies!'

But then Billy, in his jeans and a striped cotton shirt, stepped into the orange wash of the lamp; he was clutching the paper sack containing his clothes, and his face looked sick and scared.

'Come on, Billy.' John stretched out his arms. 'Come on, let's show her how men stick together.'

'Momma . . . says I should go, Daddy. She says there are things I need to learn.'

'No. She's wrong. Know what kind of things she wants you to learn? Stuff about ghosts, and death. You're a righteous, God-fearin' boy, and you shouldn't listen to things like that.'

'I didn't want to see Will Booker, Daddy. But he was there, and he needed my help.' He lifted his hand and showed his father the black lump of coal, resting on his palm.

'What's that? Where'd that come from?'

'I don't know, but I . . .1 think that Will's trying to help me now. I think he's given me this to let me know that ... I was right to go down in that basement, and just because it was dark and scary didn't mean it was evil. ...'

A deep groan came from John's throat. 'Poisoned,' he whispered, staring at the coal. 'The poison's in the blood, it's in the blood! Dear God strike me dead if I haven't tried to be the best father —'

'Stop it!' Ramona said sharply.

And suddenly Billy had run across the room, dropping his clothes-filled bag, and was clinging to his father's leg. Through his strangled sobbing the boy moaned, 'I'll be good, Daddy, I'll be good, I'll be . . .'

John shivered—whether with emotion or in disgust Ramona couldn't tell—and gripped Billy by the collar, flinging him toward his wife. 'TAKE HIM, THEN!' he shouted, and threw the car keys to the floor 'Go on, both of you! Get out of my . . .' His voice cracked, and a terrible sob came up from the depths of his soul. Billy was staring at him, tears streaming down the boy's cheeks, and John raised a hand to ward off Billy's gaze. '. . . house,' he whispered. He staggered across the room and fell down into his chair before the cold hearth, his face streaked reddish by the rising sun. 'I can't do it, Lord,' he said softly, one hand clamped at his temples and his eyes tightly closed. 'I can't get the darkness out of them. . . .' Then he was silent but for his rumbled breathing.

'Get your things,' Ramona told Billy, and then she went back to slip on socks and shoes and get her traveling bag. She would drive in her robe and change later, but right now she wanted to get herself and Billy out of the house. In the kitchen, Ramona took a few dollars and fifty cents in change from their emergency money, kept in a clay apple-shaped cookie jar that Rebekah had made for them. Then she came back to the front room and picked up the keys. Billy was standing near his father; the boy's eyes were swollen, and now he reached out and gently touched John's arm. John mumbled and groaned in his tortured, drunken sleep.

'Go on to the car,' Ramona said. 'I'll be there directly.'

When Billy had left, Ramona smoothed the tangled, dirty curls of reddish-brown hair away from her husband's forehead. The lines of his face, she thought, were getting deeper. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, steadied herself when she began trembling, and got a coverlet for him from the bedroom. She spread it over him, and watched as he gripped at it and curled up into a ball. He moaned softly in his sleep—a sound of sadness and confusion, a lost sound like a night train way off in the distance— and Ramona left the house.

FOUR

Potter's Clay

17

The old woman's hands, wet with clay, moved like brown hummingbirds to give shape to the formless lump that sat on the spinning potter's wheel before her. Vase or jar? she asked herself, her foot rhythmically tapping the horizontal wooden bar that controlled the wheel's speed. Oiled gears meshed with a quiet hissing of friction. She was partial to vases, but jars sold more quickly; Mrs. Blears, owner of the Country Crafts Shoppe twenty miles away in Selma, had told her there was a real market for her small, wide-mouthed jars glazed in dark, earthen colors. They could be used for anything from sugar jars to holding lipsticks, Mrs. Blears said, and people paid a bit more for them