“Today, you were lazy, and foolish. You let one of
Luke was afraid. He believed her, knew she did not lie. And if the girl—Claire—came back with others, with Men of the World, he knew it would mean the end of everything. And it would be his fault.
“What do I do, Momma?”
“Talk to Papa. He knows the townfolk. He’ll know who owned that truck. Then you find ’em, and you’ll find the girl. Once you do, take her heart and bring it back to me. Burn the rest. We’ll share her meat, and save ourselves from Purgatory. But you ain’t got much time to waste now. You best move.”
Luke stood. But Momma’s grip tightened around his hand. She tugged him close. The stench was overwhelming, and he shut his mouth, hoping she couldn’t hear him gagging. “You find her, or we’ll take what’s left of your pizzle and eat it with grits for breakfast, you understand?”
He nodded, and held his breath until she released him. Then he turned and headed for the door. As his hand gripped the moist, grimy knob, her voice once more stopped him.
“Keep the skin,” she demanded.
“What, Momma?”
“My boy. My Matthew. Tell your brothers to eat whatever needs eatin’, to take what they need, but they need to keep the skin for me. Winter’s comin’ and I need all the heat I can get.”
Though Luke couldn’t imagine his mother ever being cold beneath the heaps of her own slippery rotting flesh, “Yes Momma,” he said, and opened the door to the rain and smoke and the aroma of cooking meat.
-8-
There would be no prayer. Not yet. Momma-In-Bed had made it clear that there was not enough time to indulge in giving thanks, not when Hell itself might already be gathering on the horizon. He’d been with her for what had felt like hours, a long slow walk through the sluggish waters of unpleasant times. And because of that inner sense of more time lost than they could afford to lose, the sense of urgency increased. Every minute that passed him by was more distance between him and their quarry, and closing the distance between him and whatever Momma-in-Bed would do if the girl was not retrieved.
Luke ducked his head as he stepped off the porch into the gloaming. The fire cast reddish yellow light, the flames sizzling in the rain and casting shadows on his brother’s faces as they looked at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance before moving off toward the wood shed. Still, he found it harder to ignore the smacking of lips, the clicking of teeth, the greedy swallows, the tearing of meat from bones, and the murmurs of appreciation as they sat around the smoldering corpse of their brother. It was even harder to resist the smell the breeze carried to him before whipping it away into the trees behind him, where animals with dark eyes would pause and look up, curious but not nearly enough to follow the scent to its source. Even the carnivorous creatures that existed in the premature twilight beyond the trees—among them, the coyotes Momma-in-Bed feared so much—knew the small series of cabins in the woods were best avoided, for they had seen few of their fellow scavengers return from there, and so their curiosity abated quickly and they wandered on.
Luke was hungry, his stomach hollow and aching, and he was as eager as the rest of them to feed on the meat, to savor both the taste and the feeling of their dead brother’s strength settling in his own body, Matt’s unspoken thoughts, dreams, and ambitions, however simple, weaving themselves into his own brain. But the flesh would keep, he told himself, as he sighed and felt his worn boots sinking into the moist earth. He knew the importance of the task that lay ahead. If they failed this time, if the girl had already found her way to a haven they could not reach, then there would be more than the authorities to worry about. Momma-In-Bed had threatened him, but it had been merely a formality, and not a true promise. What she would do to him, maybe to all of them, if the girl was not returned, would be much worse than simply skinning his pizzle with a rusty knife. She loved him, as he loved her, but that would not be enough to save his life if he didn’t make things right, no more than it had saved poor Susanna when she’d defied them.
Teeth clenched to force back the emotions that always tried to insinuate their way into the forefront of his mind whenever he remembered his lost sister, Luke climbed the small rise where the bare earth narrowed to a single trail that wound unsteadily through a short stretch of wild untended grass. The woodshed was narrow, and old, the wood bleached by the sun so it was a mottled white, with patches of gray. In the rapidly fading light, it looked leprous, with yellow light around the edges. The door bent outward at the bottom like a well-turned page, and as he approached, that splintered corner scraped dirt and the door swung wide with a sound like rocks tumbling down a hollow pipe.
Luke stopped in his tracks.
Though not a large man, Papa-In-Gray cut an imposing figure. In daylight, his skin was the same shade as the door that was now swinging away from him. In town, he was respected, but it was respect borne of fear. At home, among his kin, things were not much different. Now, in the gloom, beneath his angular, inverted triangle of a face, the chin topped with a peppering of silver stubble, Papa wore a dirty brown apron, which Luke himself had made for him from the skin of one of the men they had caught the summer before. Strands of blue nylon rope had been looped through holes at the top corners of the apron, the holes ringed by steel washers to stop the rope from sawing through, keeping the rough rectangle in place, and also, as was the case now, to conceal the wearer’s nakedness.
Grim-faced, Papa raised his right hand. In it, he held the head of one of the youths—the one the girl had called ‘Stu’, which the family had found amusing since they figured this was most likely going to be the way he ended up. His blonde hair, though matted with filth now, still managed to retain a healthy look death had denied the rest of his body. The tanned handsome face of which Luke had found himself mildly envious, was no longer so handsome, slackened now by the pain that had ushered it into death. The eyes were closed, pale brows arched, the thick-lipped mouth open slightly, as if starting a sentence that would forever remain unspoken. Papa-in-Gray very rarely did a sloppy job with the carcasses and this one was no different. The machete had made a good straight cut through the boy’s neck, and no bone or flesh protruded from the wound.
“A good’un,” Papa said now, in his gravelly voice. “Who took the girl?”
Luke couldn’t meet his gaze as he spoke, so instead he stared at the ground. “Big red truck came and picked ’er off the road. Two niggers—one old, one young it looked like. They made off with her. Headin’ east.”
Behind his father, Luke glimpsed the rest of the boy’s naked body, splayed out on the worktable in the shed underneath a single bare light bulb. His hands and feet were gone, and his chest had been opened and excavated, the organs collected in a rusty bucket on the floor. As Luke tried to get a better look, Papa surprised him by tossing the severed head in his direction. Caught off guard, it hit Luke in the chest and he was knocked back a step. With a grunt, he staggered, feet splayed, and quickly righted himself, grabbing with his crooked fingers a handful of the boy’s hair just seconds before it hit the ground, a development he knew would not have impressed his father.
As if anything ever would.
Exhaling heavily, Luke straightened and clutched the head to his chest. Papa-in-Gray nodded, but it was not a gesture of satisfaction, rather confirmation that his disdain for Luke was justified, and no one would ever convince him otherwise.
“Take it,” the old man said, wiping bloodstained hands on the apron. The flesh seemed to soak it in. “We’re bringin’ it with us. Tell the others to get themselves a piece of those kids each’n load ’em up.”
Though Luke wasn’t sure why they were bringing along pieces of the dead kids, he knew better than to question Papa’s instructions.
“All right,” he said, and waited.
“Tell Aaron bring the truck ’round, and make sure all you boys got yer knives.” He looked over Luke’s shoulder. “Get movin’.”
