Look at this, look at what you have to do now. You’ve got to try to stop the guy.
Shad reached out but there was a hideous tearing in his stomach as the opened wound ripped wider. His voice was barely a whisper. “No. Listen-”
“Watch and learn, Shad Jenkins.”
Dave Fox, slave to the hollow and all the back hills, derailed by corn mash moonshine and mutated plagues deep inside his chromosomes, and maybe something more, gave the same smile that had branded the lips of his victims, pulled the trigger, and blasted the top third of his head off.
Chapter Nineteen
ON BOGAN ROAD, THE BULLFROGS CRAWLED out of the pond and tried to make it over the wire grass. It cut them to pieces but they kept staggering and hopping forward until their bellies were sliced open. They roared and staggered on with their guts dangling loose. Some turned back but they couldn’t make it to the water.
Pa was building coffins. One of the four Luvell shacks covered in crow shit had been torn down, and Shad’s father had carefully stacked the lumber up in the yard. He’d used the wood to complete one coffin already and was busy at work on a second. Lament sat nearby, sluggishly wagging his tail.
Mags’s hand was on Pa’s neck. Now she was reaching up to stroke his face.
You weren’t finished yet and might never be.
When you learned so much all at once, it was worse than never knowing anything at all. And you had no one left to blame except for yourself.
Glide moved about the area, working the vats of bubbling gruel, wearing heavier clothing and checking the sky. She wouldn’t remember the last time it had snowed in Moon Run, and you could tell she was a little frightened. She circled the steaming drums with a lot less wriggle today, and her cheeks were red with windburn.
As he watched, Glide slipped over to his father and gave the old man a peck on the chin. They embraced and kissed and his pa said something that made her laugh.
Shad thought,
When Glide returned to the vats, Shad straggled forward. It felt like something had given way in the small of his back. His stitches were loose but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. He limped toward Glide. He had to admit, the smell of the boiling whiskey made him feel a bit better.
“Haven’t seen you for a spell,” she said. “You hurt? Why you walking so odd? Is that blood in your hair?”
Shad tried to form a response but could only stare.
“What’s this look on your face? You didn’t know about me and your pa?”
“No.”
“What’s that?”
He coughed and spit bloody phlegm. His throat burned badly and his voice had a rough, grating squeak to it. “I said no.”
“You sound funny. I would’ve thought he’d have told you about that by now. He asked me to marry him.”
Yes, you might’ve thought your father would tell you something like that. That you had a seventeen-year-old new mom. It might make for a good topic of conversation. “When did he propose?”
“A day or two after the last time you was here.”
Before he’d gone up Gospel Trail Road.
“Did you agree?”
“A ’course,” she said, like she found it odd he was even asking.
“Why’s my father making coffins?”
“Well, Venn’s dead. That’s who the big one is for. I’m not sure about the others. Maybe he’s going to sell them.”
So that’s the way it was getting now, when you could just drop the fact that your own brother was dead without even a note of sorrow. “What happened to Venn?”
“Dunno. Think his brain just rusted in place until it stopped telling his heart and lungs to work. He didn’t suffer none.”
It made Shad think about the scene this morning again, with Jake and Becka Dudlow on the stump out back of Mrs. Rhyerson’s. “Where’s Hoober?”
“Don’t know that either. Ain’t nobody seen him in over a month. Maybe he left the hollow.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You might be right at that.”
Karl Jenkins crouched near M’am’s front door, hammering at the lumber. His craggy features were fixed with intent, and his deep-set eyes had glazed a bit, the melancholia sort of just rattling around in there. The terrible grace and brutal force within him was barely constrained, and Pa’s lips were scabbed from where he’d been chewing them. Or from where Glide had been gnawing on him.
His father didn’t look up at him.
“Hello, Pa.”
“Hello, son.”
“Dave Fox is dead in our house.”
Pa didn’t appear to be surprised, and kept working with the wood.
“You already knew that, didn’t you? Is that who you’re building this coffin for?”
His father said, “Venn passed on a few days back. They got his body wrapped in the barn. Nobody’s seen Hoober in so long that they’re fearing he’s come to an awful end too.”
But Shad was certain that his father already knew Dave was lying spattered across the bedroom, a few feet from Mags’s last love letter to him.
“Who told you about Dave Fox? Was it Megan? Or did you find a note scuffed in the dirt?”
“You’re talking foolish now, Shad. I’ll hear no more a’that.”
“Or was it Dave himself, Pa? Did Dave come by and tell you he blew his brains out in front of me?”
But Dave wasn’t dead. You didn’t live in the hollow, and you couldn’t die in it either.
“Shad, you’ve gone a little sick, son. That’s what happens when you head up the bad road into them woods. You need to go inside and talk with M’am. She’s gonna help you.”
“Will she?”
“Go on now.”
His father dismissing him was both comforting and insulting. He wanted to shout at Pa and explain how he’d committed murder with his own hands. But Tandy Mae had been right. Once his father had made his peace with Shad going up into the hills, he’d considered his son lost to him. It was an act of will. The same way it took incredible resolve for Pa to ignore Megan’s hand pressing across his cheek.
“I’ve still got more to say to you.”
“I don’t wanna talk no more right now, son. Go on inside.”
Shad realized his father was silently sobbing, the man’s shoulders quivering. It should have startled him but somehow it didn’t. “You were right, Pa. That the dead don’t rest in the hollow.”
His father’s strong palm came up and flattened against Shad’s belly. It came away red and wet. Tears tracked his cheeks. “You’re bleeding, son. Please go on inside now, she’ll help with that too.”
“Sure. Congratulations on the new bride.”
You couldn’t do anything except follow the course laid out in front of you. Megan had been right. You didn’t choose, you were chosen.
Shad stepped to M’am Luvell’s ramshackle pineboard door and tapped as the walls creaked and scraped together, tilting worse than before. His knuckles came away stained with wet moss. If the shack went over, it would crush his father.
The dying bullfrogs continued to roar and scream.
M’am’s voice, dangerous and without the quaint mischief, slid out through the slats like a fishing blade. “Shad Jenkins, you just-”
