her expression changed. Only her mouth shifted, from pout to frown to grin. You got more from considering her lips than from watching the blunt angles of her flesh.
“So,” Shad said, “what do you ask of me?”
It made her laugh. “My, but you do have brass, boy. It’ll serve you well for what you got coming.”
“Do you have something to say or are we just going to stand here? I feel like we’re doing a drug deal.”
“I won’t keep you long. Let’s head around the town square.”
She kept eyeing him impassively. Venn’s enormous hands rested lightly on the back of the wheelchair, pressing M’am along. Lament heeled pretty well for a puppy and never left Shad’s ankle.
M’am appeared to be having a difficult time finding a handle on him to pull. She said, “Hoober done saw you out night walkin’.”
“It happens on occasion.”
She nodded at him, as if listening to someone else close by or watching things occurring around them that he couldn’t see.
“You go out of your way to do that?” he asked.
“What’s this?”
“You know, being off-putting the way you are, enjoying the unease of others. Or so it looks to me.”
She puffed on her pot and showed her brown nubby teeth. “Just sort of happens. My apologies to you, Shad Jenkins.”
The lady had a way about her all right, making it seem like he was just being sensitive, weak-minded. He stared at Venn again, took a step closer. Venn apparently didn’t recognize him.
Shad’s patience was a lot more limited now. The sensation that time was running out was beginning to overcome him.
“I expected you to come see me again,” M’am said.
“Why? You didn’t tell me anything useful before.”
She considered that, then shrugged. “That may be. Even so, it’d behoove you to indulge me a few minutes.”
“So you keep telling me. And so I keep doing.”
The laughter coming up in her made the bones clatter in her chest. “I been thinkin’ about your problem.”
“Which one?”
“The one that’s gonna send you up into them back hills.”
“What if I don’t go?”
“You will. I didn’t tell you everything about that day my mama was taken.”
“I figured not.”
M’am began to fidget in her chair, contorting until the toes of one foot popped up through the blankets, then vanished again.
“I already done declared how I used to go up there with my ma and pa on Sunday afternoons after church.”
“Yes. When you were dressed in pink with pretty bows in your blond hair, riding up in an ox wagon. You said it might be hard for somebody to picture that now, but it isn’t really.”
“That’s ’cause you see me as a child due to my size. Lots of folks do. They come to ask my advice on matters, and some of them pay me with candy and chocolate. Or with corn-husk dollies and little booties they stitched together. I don’t fret it none. We all got our notions and preconceptions. Now let me get on with it.”
“Sure.”
Something touched him and he looked down to see her tiny fingers plying his wrist. He didn’t know what it meant for a second until he thought she must want the rag back. What would a hex woman do with the blood on it? Use it to beguile somebody in his name? Cast a protection spell around him?
He handed the piece of cloth to her and she looked disgusted. “Gah, boy, keep it.”
“I thought you wanted it back.”
“The hell for? No, I was just patting your hand, the way your mother probably done, even if you don’t remember it none.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
She didn’t hear him, which meant they were into it and already deep. M’am Luvell’s teeth ground down on her pipe and her gaze grew faraway, scanning backwards in time and finding horror.
“That ground is scornful and them woods is demented. The wraiths, they come up out of the gorge and across the land like a whirlwind and took my mama.” The strength of her emotions made her writhe in the chair as she tried to fight back a groan of distress but finally gave in. Lament keyed in on the old woman’s anguish and let loose with a whine. So did Venn. M’am’s voice had lost all its force. “It… it done things to her first.”
“You sure it wasn’t just a man?” Shad asked. “A deranged trapper living up there? Or a bear? Mountain lion?”
“I wasn’t a toddler nor a fool. I was four years old and I know what happened. Besides, no man would do that to a woman.”
A few guys in C-Block had done things with women that had gotten them written up in psychological textbooks. They’d even had psychoses named after them. There was one inmate on death row who’d lived in solitary for six years because of what he’d done to his daughter. He was the subject of a documentary called
“You see how big Venn is? He gets that from my side of the family, if’n you accept it and even if you don’t. My daddy, he was two three inches taller than Venn even. No man ever scairt my daddy, nor bested him neither. My daddy would’ve folded any trapper in half, lunatic or not. He hunted bear and mountain cat regular, and he had respect for ’em but no fear of any animal.”
They made their way around the square, past the Civil War statues and the trim shrubs, the small stone walls where the town trustees and office clerks sometimes sat and took their lunches.
“My daddy… my papa…” The tears spilled freely down her cheeks and slid away in the crevices of her wrinkles. “My papa, he left me there. The ox ran and took off with the cart. Papa ran screaming after them back down Gospel Trail. I ran too, into the woods, didn’t know no better. The wraiths clung to me and pretended like they wanted to play. But in time they started to nibble at me, but they was slow after what they done to Mama. They was sated. They eventually let me go on my own way, more or less.”
“Why would ghosts do that?”
“I didn’t say a damn thing ’bout no ghosts. Ghosts is just dead folks that believe they’re still alive. Wraiths is something more. I don’t know exactly what, but that’s what all abides up in them hills. They part of the sick ground. Took me a full day to get back to town from Jonah Ridge. No one came lookin’ for me that night, not even my papa.”
“How do I stop it?” he asked, and the seriousness in his tone brought Lament’s chin up.
“You ask for help,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“You know what I mean, boy. You ask for help from those you talk to when you go night walkin’.”
It felt like someone had just struck him with a chilled ice pick. “What do you know about it, M’am?”
“I know you got the touch. The resolve to rile them woods even worse than they are. Ah yuh. Maybe you got the strength to put ’em to rest for a time. You call on those you call on, Shad Jenkins. Maybe they’ll help.”
A weighty silence passed between them, but neither looked away. He stood back and gazed at the dwarf granny witch woman, trying to decide which one of them was crazy, her or himself. He was sort of leaning toward both.
“What did your father say to you?” he asked. “The next day when you got back to town.”
“He never said nothin’ to me, and after he told some lies to the sheriff, he never spoke to anyone again. Said Mama fell into the gorge on her own. He was scared they’d think he was cracked. He stopped talkin’ and stopped workin’ and three years later he tried to hang himself in the barn. Hung there an hour or two ’fore Aunt Tilly found him, and he was still alive. He was that strong. They took him away to a hospital in Enigma County. He lived to be eighty-seven ’fore he died there, and never said another word to nobody. Good riddance, I say. My papa died that day on the ridge when he turned tail.” She relit her pipe and eased the smoke toward him. “You remember that story up there when you face down the darkness.”
