WOOD TICK WASN’T so much as town as it was a wide rip in the forest. The Reverend Jebediah Mercer rode in on ebony horse on a coolish autumn day beneath an overcast sky of humped up, slow-blowing, gun-metal-grey clouds; they seemed to crawl. It was his experience nothing good ever took place under a crawling sky. It was an omen, and he didn’t like omens, because, so far in his experience, none of them were good.
Before him, he saw a sad excuse for a town: a narrow clay road and a few buildings, not so much built up as tossed up, six altogether, three of them leaning south from northern winds that had pushed them. One of them had had a fireplace of stone, but it had toppled, and no one had bothered to rebuild it. The stones lay scattered about like discarded cartridges. Grass, yellowed by time, had grown up through the stones, and even a small tree had sprouted between them. Where the fall of the fireplace had left a gap was a stretch of fabric, probably a slice of tent; it had been nailed up tight and it had turned dark from years of weather.
In the middle of the town there was a wagon with wooden bars set into it and a flat heavy roof. No horses. Its axle rested on the ground giving the wagon a tilt. Inside, leaning, the Reverend could see a man clutching at the bars, cursing at a half-dozen young boys who looked likely to grow up to be ugly men, who were throwing rocks at him. An old man was sitting on the precarious porch of one of the leaning buildings, whittling on a stick. A few other folks moved about, crossing the street with the enthusiasm of the ill, giving no mind to the boys or the man in the barred wagon.
Reverend Mercer got off his horse and walked it to a hitching post in front of the sagging porch and looked at the man who was whittling. The man had a goitre on the side of his neck and he had tied it off in a dirty sack that fastened under his jaw and to the top of his head and was fastened under his hat. The hat was wide and dropped shadow on his face. The face needed concealment. He had the kind of features that made you wince; one thing God could do was he could sure make ugly.
“Sir, may I ask you something?” the Reverend said to the whittling man.
“I reckon.”
“Why is that man in that cage?”
“That there is Wood Tick’s jail. All we got. We been meaning to build one, but we don’t have that much need for it. Folks do anything really wrong, we hang ’em.”
“What did he do?”
“He’s just half-witted.”
“That’s a crime?”
“If we want it to be. He’s always talkin’ this and that, and it gets old. He used to be all right, but he ain’t now. We don’t know what ails him. He’s got stories about haints and his wife done run off and he claims a haint got her.”
“Haints?”
“That’s right.”
Reverend Mercer turned his head toward the cage and the boys tossing rocks. They were flinging them in good and hard, and pretty accurate.
“Having rocks thrown at him can not be productive,” the Reverend said.
“Well, if God didn’t want him half-witted and the target of rocks, he’d have made him smarter and less directed to bullshit.”
“I am a man of God and I have to agree with you. God’s plan doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy in it. But humanity can do better. We could at least save this poor man from children throwing rocks.”
“Sheriff doesn’t think so.”
“And who is the sheriff.”
“That would be me. You ain’t gonna give me trouble are you?”
“I just think a man should not be put behind bars and have rocks thrown at him for being half-witted.”
“Yeah, well, you can take him with you, long as you don’t bring him back. Take him with you and I’ll let him out.”
The Reverend nodded. “I can do that. But, I need something to eat first. Any place for that?”
“You can go over to Miss Mary’s, which is a house about a mile down from the town, and you can hire her to fix you some-thin’. But you better have a strong stomach.”
“Not much of a recommendation.”
“No, it’s not. I reckon I could fry you up some meat for a bit of coin, you ready to let go of it.”
“I have money.”
“Good. I don’t. I got some horse meat I can fix. It’s just on this side of being good enough to eat. Another hour, you might get poisoned by it.”
“Appetising as that sounds, perhaps I should see Miss Mary.”
“She fixes soups from roots and wild plants and such. No matter what she fixes, it all tastes the same and it gives you the squirts. She ain’t much to look at neither, but she sells out herself, you want to buy some of that.”
“No. I am good. I will take the horse meat, long as I can watch you fry it.”
“All right. I’m just about through whittling.”
“Are you making something?”
“No. Just whittlin’.”
“So, what is there to get through with?”
“Why my pleasure, of course. I enjoy my whittlin’.”
The old man, who gave the Reverend his name as if he had given up a dark secret, was called Jud. Up close, Jud was even nastier looking than from the distance of the hitching post and the porch. He had pores wide enough and deep enough in his skin to keep pooled water and his nose had been broken so many times it moved from side to side when he talked. He was missing a lot of teeth, and what he had were brown from tobacco and rot. His hands were dirty and his fingers were dirtier yet, and the Reverend couldn’t help but wonder what those fingers had poked into.
Inside, the place leaned and there were missing floor boards. A wooden stove was at the far end of the room, and a stove pipe wound out of it and went up through a gap in the roof that would let in rain, and had, because the stove was partially rusted. It rested heavy on the worn flooring. The floor sagged and it seemed to the Reverend that if it experienced one more rotted fibre, one more termite bite, the stove would crash through. Hanging on hooks on the wall there were slabs of horse meat covered in flies. Some of the meat looked a little green and there was a slick of mould over a lot of it.
“That the meat you’re talkin’ about?”
“Yep,” Jud said, scratching at his filthy goitre sack.
“It looks pretty green.”
“I said it was turnin’. Want it or not?”
“Might I cook it myself?”
“Still have to pay me.”
“How much?”
“Two bits.”
“Two bits, for rancid meat I cook myself.”
“It’s still two bits if I cook it.”
“You drive quite the bargain, Jud.”
“I pride myself on my dealin’.”
“Best you do not pride yourself on hygiene.”
“What’s that? That some kind of remark?”
Reverend Mercer pushed back his long black coat and showed the butts of his twin revolvers. “Sometimes a man can learn to like things he does not on most days care to endure.”
Jud checked out the revolvers. “You got a point there, Reverend. I was thinkin’ you was just a blabber mouth for God, but you tote them pistols like a man whose seen the elephant.”
“Seen the elephant I have. And all his children.”
The Reverend brushed the flies away from the horse meat and found a bit of it that looked better than rest,
