Shad was getting the feeling that he’d somehow missed an important facet to the county and was only now getting around to it. “Not really. Tell me what they say.”
Glide appeared embarrassed by her outburst, humbled enough to actually dip her chin and blush. The rosy flush of her cheeks was authentic enough to tug at his guts.
She put on a moderately enticing girlish act, as if trying to throw him off the scent of her anxiety. There was a taunt in her eyes as well, the kind that made crazed lonely men run for shotguns to battle one another, and he knew better than to put his hand on her now.
“M’am gives tell that there’s wraiths out that way. The suicides can’t sleep. Hiding in the deadwood and brambles just waiting to catch folk. The land’s got a taint to it, she warns everybody. I’m not saying I believe that, but if you ever heard my M’am going on about spirits, you’d give ’em considerable thought.”
“You’re right,” he admitted.
M’am Luvell, Glide’s great-grandmother, was a hex woman the superstitious kin of the hollow respected and feared. They brought their sick children to her, their cows that didn’t give enough milk. The pumpkin heads and the kids with flippers. They came for love potions and charms to ward off the evil eye. They carried their chickens and their terror, and she would feed on it. All of it. Shad sort of liked the lady.
“Her mama was thrown into the chasm when M’am was a missy. Diptheria, I think. Or cholera. She watched it happen. She says the wraiths came out of the rocks and spent the afternoon with her, playing with her at first, then chasing and chewing on her legs.”
After Shad’s mother died, Pa went to M’am Luvell for a tonic to take his nightmares away-moon wasn’t strong enough anymore. She’d taught him how to play chess.
“I’d like to see her,” Shad said.
“Go right on,” Glide told him, aiming her tits to show him the way. “It’s not my place to stop anyone. Nor to urge ’em on, neither.”
Venn squirmed beneath the hay for a moment, whimpered, and lay still again.
BULLFROGS ROARED IN THE POND AND THE WIRE grass appeared alive, agitated as it knifed into the breeze. Shad moved to the nearest shanty and stood at the ramshackle pineboard door. He reached out to knock and the walls groaned in protest, tilting horribly. The years of humidity, rain, and moss bleeding into the wood had rotted it to tissue paper. He tapped with his index finger and hoped the splintering door wouldn’t fall off its hinges.
M’am’s voice, low and almost dangerous, but filled with a quaint mischief, called out through the thick spaces between the slats. “Come on inside now, Shad Jenkins. Don’t you worry none ’bout my home. It’ll last long enough to serve me my remaining years, rest your mind on that.”
He was still giving too much of himself away. He walked in and instantly felt as if he’d stepped into a pagan place of worship. A hallowed arena where the blood never finished soaking into the earth. Some areas had an innate sense of sanctuary about them. Another person’s belief could wrap around your throat as tightly as your own.
M’am Luvell sat huddled on a small seat suited for a child, smoking a pipe. She nodded at him, eyes closed. Her dwarf’s body was hidden beneath afghans and oversized sweaters, except for the stubby fingers with yellow cracked nails, wrapped around her pipe. Some of the folk in Moon Run Hollow carved their own from corncobs or hickory, but hers was store-bought and expensive. It gave the hex woman another element of contradiction.
Even so, he was a little surprised to realize she was smoking marijuana. The sweet stink of it filled the shack and made him clear his throat.
He waited. Five minutes passed. It was a test of his patience, he knew. You learned more about people when they jumped than when they didn’t.
The room was empty except for a small table in the corner, a plate and some utensils on it, and a kitchen area filled with wooden boxes and glass bowls filled with powders, roots, and herbs. Opposite that, a tiny bed with a cotton-stuffed mattress. At its foot rested the homemade wicker-backed wheelchair they would use to push her around downtown. Shad drifted over, inspected it, and recognized the work. His father had built everything in the house.
M’am Luvell had crossed to the point where age no longer mattered. There was a timeless quality to her, like a stone outcropping barely forming the shape of an old woman. The fierce decades had passed her in these mountains and done what damage they could, but she’d survived the forces thrown against her.
Shad tried to imagine how she might stretch her hand out and call him over to her. So that he’d crouch at her side while she patted his head with a diminutive hand, whispering words of understanding to him. You were always looking for somebody to trust.
“Commiseration,” she said, opening her eyes. “Comfort and condolences.”
“Thank you.”
“First time you been by since you were a child.”
He nodded, remembering back to when he was about five and Pa had brought him here. “You helped my father when he needed it.”
“That wasn’t so much.” She noticed her pipe was out and laid it aside on the table. “I just gave him a game to take his mind off his troubles.”
“It still does,” Shad said. “Considering the burden of his worries, that counts for a great deal.”
“For some neighbors, maybe,” she told him. “But not all.”
“Sure.”
That was the end of it, these preliminaries. He felt it come to a close as if a cell door had slammed shut. M’am Luvell had pondered him long enough and was now ready. “So, what do you ask of me?”
“I’m not certain,” he said.
“Well, you think on it some.”
She cocked her head, watching him impassively. He glanced around and wondered what the hollow folk did with their chickens when they brought them to her. Did they just toss them on the floor so that you had squawking hens flapping all over? What other payments did they make? Since there was no place else to sit, did they kneel? He couldn’t recall if his father had stood straight before M’am. Shad remembered lying on the floor, staring at spiders in the corner.
“They say my sister just fell asleep out there in the woods on Gospel Trail.”
“But you don’t believe it none?”
“I want to have an answer.”
She broke into a quiet titter that sounded like bones clicking together. “I always did like the Jenkins men. You got an easy honesty about you. Sometimes leaves you stupid and exposed, but it’s still a peculiar quality around these parts.”
Shad was getting a little tired of people calling him stupid all the time, even if it might be true, but he said nothing.
“You afraid of me, boy?”
“No.”
“Why’s that? Hex women scare most hollow folk.”
Telling her the candid fact that geriatric dwarves didn’t hold much sway in the world most of the time just didn’t much appeal to him, so Shad went at it a different way.
“I knew a guy in prison just like you. An older man who did a lot of smirking and chuckling. He knew people from the inside out and used it to his advantage. He talked up a streak and could slap you back into your place without half-trying. You looked at him and no matter who you were, you still saw somebody twelve feet high, with plenty of power in his face. It made a lot of cons cringe and hold their heads down.”
“Who be that fella?” she asked.
“The warden.”
M’am Luvell burst into a brittle laughter and shuddered in her seat. Drool slid down her billy-goat chin and clung to the curling white hairs. “You got wit. Your pa ain’t got any of that wag.”
Shad didn’t exactly find it so witty, telling the truth. “He’s got some.”
“And what happened to this warden? I can see by the way you’re leaning that there’s more you got to say on him.”
He looked down and saw she was right, he actually was leaning. No matter how hard you worked at it, you
