November Mourns

“I’m right next to you.”

“Shad?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, there. Hello.”

“Hello, Mama.”

She smiled and held her hand out to him. If he took it, she would vanish and he’d awaken on the bed and immediately begin spitting up blood.

Now, he had an awful anxiety working through him that Megan had somehow willed this visit and was watching from nearby. He wanted to ask the white bishop about Mags but decided against it. You could only handle one ghost at a time. It unsettled him to think his sister might begin appearing to him like this, lost and perpetually confused, the way his mother had been coming to him since he was eleven or twelve years old.

When he was a child, his mother’s spirit had been full of anger and bitterness, and spent most of her stays doing little more than railing against his father. Since then, she’d lost more and more of her interest in this world, but he couldn’t figure out if he was somehow calling her to him, and if so, what he could do to stop it.

“Shad? You listen, son. You listen to me.”

“He is,” the white bishop said, by way of helping.

“Shh. Leave her be.” Shad moved to his mother until her gaze fell on him once more. “I’m listening, Mama.”

“Stay off that road.”

He had to be sure he knew what she meant. “Which road?”

“The Gospel road. They get taken away up there.”

“How did Megan die?”

“She’s not my girl. That isn’t my daughter.”

“No, but she’s my sister.”

The blunt angles of her face sharpened with anger. “The harlot. He lay with the harlot. I still had skin, the earth wasn’t cold, and he sanded his stone and cleaved to another.”

Shad was surprised. It was the most emotion she’d shown him in years. “What happens on that road, Mama?”

“There’s bad will.”

That was true everywhere you went. “Who did it to her? Did somebody hurt her? What was she doing there?”

“They don’t prove love with their teeth,” she said, and the bishop nodded. He appeared weaker, grieving, and she glanced over and gave him a look of anguish. “They leave their marks and they can even kill, yes, but it’s all in vain. Listen to me, they don’t demonstrate, you see. They don’t represent. They don’t represent the savior. Instead, it’s the land. One with the river. It’s him. He represents.”

A word that had a whole different meaning in the can-the gangbangers and car boosters used it all the time. She kept at it, swaying now. “But he can demonstrate his belief on his belly. Our Lord, our Lord. My God. But they all manifest nothing more than poison. Do you understand that?”

“No,” he told her.

Manifest wasn’t a word his mother would know, even in the afterlife. It was a word he wouldn’t have known himself before all the books in prison. “You stay away from there. They will take you.”

The white bishop, acting the guardian, raised his shepherd’s staff over Shad’s body on the bed. The band of cloth around his neck continued to flap and waver as if buffeted by winds. As guide, he shook his arms and allowed the bells to ring quietly.

Shad’s hands tightened into fists, the sheets twisted and bunched around him. Mags had been a part of the spot inside him that no one could touch. She had kept him alive in prison and now he’d never be able to thank her. He began to sob in his sleep but the despondent sound choked off quickly.

Groaning once, he dreamed of revenging himself on whoever had taken his sister from him, and soon began to whimper. His mother clawed the air, advanced like an animal, and sprang at him. The moment they touched he opened his eyes, flailed aside, and coughed blood onto the floor.

Chapter Four

THE TEMPERATURE HAD DROPPED DURING the night. Over the wide curve of the ridge the countryside sloped into an area lined with virgin stands of more slash pine. The scent of matted cedar rose and wafted along the rutted road. Around them grew thin white oak and the heavy grasses only occasionally trimmed back by the chain gang road crews. Off to the east were thickets of briar and heavy thistle that could flay a hiker who’d taken a wrong turn.

Shad stood staring at the hard-packed earth where Megan’s body had been discovered, trying to confess to her how sorry he felt, through the endless veil.

“My pa tells me this is a bad road,” Shad said.

Dave glanced over. “Mine says the same.”

“He ever explain why?”

“You know the history of the area. The plague victims. It gets him edgy. Something left over from their fathers and grandfathers, I suppose.”

Shad thought of his old man twisted out of shape, his mother’s elusive warnings that would probably never be unraveled. “There’s more than that.”

“There always is.”

Deputy Dave Fox, dressed in his sharply creased gray uniform, crossed his massive arms over his chest. He shifted his stance until the leather of his gun belt creaked. With his jacket partway open, you could see that the neatness… the straightness of his pinned tie was so perfect it appeared to be nailed to him.

You couldn’t get away from the feeling that Dave was about a hundred years displaced. Someone who should’ve been out there driving cattle across the plains, fighting Indians hand to hand, or walking down the middle of a boomtown street heading for a shoot-out. Shad had always held a tremendous admiration for Dave, even in school when they were kids. Back then, it had bordered on something like reverence. Now Shad didn’t know what it was. Maybe the same thing.

After joining the local police force at eighteen, Dave had broken up the Boxcars ring in Okra County, all on his own. Over on Route 12, with the whores’ rusty trailers out back, the hole in the wall barroom had become a hot spot of loaded gambling and contaminated moon in the space of six months. The white slavery ring had brought in underage girls from as far off as Poverhoe City. The Southern mob guys would come around for some fun and go off their nuts, and they still held lynching raids when they got drunk enough.

Dave had kicked it all down in about two hours. Killed three men and the madam, who’d just finished beating a teenage girl unconscious with a car antenna for not being perky enough with a businessman from Memphis. He arrested seven other thugs before Sheriff Increase Wintel even showed up. Dave had been shot twice in the thigh by a.22 and it hadn’t slowed him up a step. He received a commendation and had his photo taken with the governor.

“I’ve never been out this way,” Shad admitted.

“Not even when you were blocking moonrunners for Luppy Joe Anson?”

“I only did it for one summer, and he had no buyers anywhere near here.”

“None of them do, but sometimes when they’re trying to slip the highway patrol, they come out because of the turnoffs, hide in the brush or around the creeks. Powder the cops’ faces tearing along the dirt roads and kicking up dust.”

“It doesn’t work. I stuck closer to town.”

“That’s why you never got caught.”

Some of the runners, they were only in it for the game. If the police weren’t involved, coming at them from all sides and putting up roadblocks, it just wasn’t any fun.

“What’s over that way?” Shad asked, looking up the trail. It annoyed him that he didn’t know the lay of the land here, as if it had been hidden from him. “Is it just the trestle leading to the other side of the gorge?”