Bag of Bones (75 page)

“I ain't done!” she cried in a cracked, breaking voice. “He was the worst, don't you understand? He was the worst and it's his blood in her and I won't rest until I
have it out
!”

There was a gruesome ripping sound. She had inhabited the birch, made it into a physical body of some sort and intended to tear it free of the earth. She would come and get me with it if she could; kill me with it if she could. Strangle me in limber branches. Stuff me with leaves until I looked like a Christmas decoration.

“No matter how much of a monster he was, Kyra had nothing to do with what he did,” I said. “And you won't have her.”

“Yes I
will
!” the Green Lady screamed. The ripping, rending sounds were louder now. They were joined by a hissing, shaky crackle. I didn't look around again. I didn't
dare
look around. I dug faster instead. “Yes I
will
have her!” she cried, and now the voice was closer. She was coming for me but I refused to see; when it comes to walking trees and bushes, I'll
stick to
Macbeth,
thanks. “I
will
have her! He took mine and
I mean to take his
!”

“Go away,” a new voice said.

The spade loosened in my hands, almost fell. I turned and saw Jo standing below me and to my right. She was looking at Sara, who had materialized into a lunatic's hallucination—a monstrous greenish-black thing that slipped with every step it tried to walk along The Street. She had left the birch behind yet assumed its vitality somehow—the actual tree huddled behind her, black and shrivelled and dead. The creature born of it looked like the Bride of Frankenstein as sculpted by Picasso. In it, Sara's face came and went, came and went.

The Shape,
I thought coldly.
It was always real . . . and if it was always me, it was always her, too.

Jo was dressed in the white shirt and yellow slacks she'd had on the day she died. I couldn't see the lake through her as I had been able to see it through Devore and Devore's young friends; she had materialized herself completely. I felt a curious
draining
sensation at the back of my skull and thought I knew how.

“Git out, bitch!” the Sara-thing snarled. It raised its arms toward Jo as it had raised them to me in my worst nightmares.

“Not at all.” Jo's voice remained calm. She turned toward me. “Hurry, Mike. You have to be quick. It's not really her anymore. She's let one of the Outsiders in, and they're very dangerous.”

“Jo, I love you.”

“I love you t—”

Sara shrieked and then began to spin. Leaves and
branches blurred together and lost coherence; it was like watching something liquefy in a blender. The entity which had only looked a little like a woman to begin with now dropped its masquerade entirely. Something elemental and grotesquely inhuman began to form out of the maelstrom. It leaped at my wife. When it struck her, the color and solidity left Jo as if slapped away by a huge hand. She became a phantom struggling with the thing which raved and shrieked and clawed at her.

“Hurry, Mike!”
she screamed.
“Hurry!”

I bent to the job.

The spade struck something that wasn't dirt, wasn't stone, wasn't wood. I scraped along it, revealing a filthy mold-crusted swatch of canvas. Now I dug like a madman, wanting to clear as much of the buried object as I could, wanting to fatten my chances of success as much as I could. Behind me, the Shape screamed in fury and my wife screamed in pain. Sara had given up part of her discorporate self in order to gain her revenge, had let in something Jo called an Outsider. I had no idea what that might be and never
wanted
to know. Sara was its conduit, I knew that much. And if I could take care of her in time—

I reached into the dripping hole, slapping wet earth from the ancient canvas. Faint stencilled letters appeared when I did:
J. M. MCCURDIE SAWMILL
. McCurdie's had burned in the fires of '33, I knew. I'd seen a picture of it in flames somewhere. As I seized the canvas, the tips of my fingers punching through and letting out a fresh billow of green and gassy stench, I could hear grunting. I could hear

Devore. He's lying on top of her and grunting like a pig.
Sara is semiconscious, muttering unintelligibly through bruised lips which are shiny with blood. Devore is looking back over his shoulder at Draper Finney and Fred Dean. They have raced after the boy and brought him back, but he won't stop yelling, he's yelling to beat the band, yelling to wake the dead, and if they can hear the Methodists singing “How I Love to Tell the Story” over here, then
they
may be able to hear the yowling nigger over there. Devore says “Put him in the water, shut him up.” The minute he says it, as though the words are magic words, his cock begins to stiffen.

“What do you mean?” Ben Merrill asks.

“You know goddam well,” Jared says. He pants the words out, jerking his hips as he speaks. His narrow ass gleams in the afternoon light. “He seen us! You want to cut his throat, get his blood all over you? Fine by me. Here. Take my knife, be my guest!”

“N-No, Jared!” Ben cries in horror, actually seeming to cringe at the sight of the knife.

He is finally ready. It takes him a little longer, that's all, he ain't a kid like these other ones. But now—! Never mind her smart mouth, never mind her insolent way of laughing, never mind the whole township. Let them all show up and watch if they like. He slips it to her, what she's wanted all along, what all her kind want. He slips it in and sinks it deep. He continues giving orders even as he rapes her. Up and down his ass goes, tick-tock, just like a cat's tail. “Somebody take care of him! Or do you want to spend forty years rotting in Shawshank because of a nigger boy's tattle?”

Ben seizes one of Kito Tidwell's arms, Oren Peebles the other, but by the time they have dragged him as far as the embankment they have lost their heart. Raping an uppity nigger woman with the gall to laugh at Jared when he fell
down and split his britches is one thing. Drowning a scared kid like a kitten in a mudpuddle . . . that's another one altogether.

They loosen their grip, staring into each other's haunted eyes, and Kito pulls free.

“Run, honey!” Sara cries. “Run away and get—” Jared clamps his hands around her throat and begins choking.

The boy trips over his own berry bucket and thumps gracelessly to the ground. Harry and Draper recapture him easily. “What you going to do?” Draper asks in a kind of desperate whine, and Harry replies

“What I have to.” That's what he replied, and now I was going to do what I had to—in spite of the stench, in spite of Sara, in spite of my dead wife's shrieks. I hauled the roll of canvas out of the ground. The ropes which had tied it shut at either end held, but the roll itself split down the middle with a hideous burping sound.

“Hurry!”
Jo cried.
“I can't hold it much longer!”

It snarled; it bayed like a dog. There was a loud wooden crunch, like a door being slammed hard enough to splinter, and Jo wailed. I grabbed for the carry-bag with Slips 'n Greens printed on the front and tore it open as

Harry—the others call him Irish because of his carrot-colored hair—grabs the struggling kid in a clumsy kind of bearhug and jumps into the lake with him. The kid struggles harder than ever; his straw hat comes off and floats on the water. “Get that!” Harry pants. Fred Dean kneels and fishes out the dripping hat. Fred's eyes are dazed, he's got the look of a fighter about one round from hitting the canvas. Behind them Sara Tidwell has begun to rattle deep in her chest and throat—like the sight of the boy's clenching hand,
these sounds will haunt Draper Finney until his final dive into Eades Quarry. Jared sinks his fingers deeper, pumping and choking at the same time, the sweat pouring off him. No amount of washing will take the smell of that sweat out of these clothes, and when he begins to think of it as “murder-sweat,” he burns the clothes to get shed of it.

Harry Auster wants to be shed of it all—to be shed of it and never see these men again, most of all Jared Devore, who he now thinks must be Lord Satan himself. Harry cannot go home and face his father unless this nightmare is over, buried. And his mother! How can he ever face his beloved mother, Bridget Auster with her round sweet Irish face and graying hair and comforting shelf of bosom, Bridget who has always had a kind word or a soothing hand for him, Bridget Auster who has been Saved, Washed in the Blood of the Lamb, Bridget Auster who is even now serving pies at the picnic they're having at the new church, Bridget Auster who is mamma; how can he ever look at her again—or she him—if he has to stand in court on a charge of raping and beating a woman, even a black woman?

So he yanks the clinging boy away—Kito scratches him once, just a nick on the side of the neck, and that night Harry will tell his mamma it was a bush-pricker that caught him unawares and he will let her put a kiss on it—and then he plunges the child into the lake. Kito looks up at him, his face shimmering, and Harry sees a little fish flick by. A perch, he thinks. For an instant he wonders what the boy must see, looking up through the silver shield of the surface at the face of the fellow who's holding him down, the fellow who's drowning him, and then Harry pushes that away.
Just a nigger,
he reminds himself desperately.
That's all he is, just a nigger. No kin of yours.

Kito's arm comes out of the water—his dripping dark-brown
arm. Harry pulls back, not wanting to be clawed, but the hand doesn't reach for him, only sticks straight up. The fingers curl into a fist. Open. Curl into a fist. Open. Curl into a fist. The boy's thrashing begins to ease, the kicking feet begin to slow down, the eyes looking up into Harry's eyes are taking on a curiously dreamy look, and still that brown arm sticks straight up, still the hand opens and closes, opens and closes. Draper Finney stands on the shore crying, sure that
now
someone will come along,
now
someone will see the terrible thing they have done—the terrible thing they are in fact still doing.
Be sure your sin will find you out,
it says in the Good Book.
Be sure.
He opens his mouth to tell Harry to quit, maybe it's still not too late to take it back, let him up, let him live, but no sound comes out. Behind him Sara is choking her last. In front of him her drowning son's hand opens and closes, opens and closes, the reflection of it shimmering on the water, and Draper thinks
Won't it stop doing that, won't it ever stop doing that?
And as if it were a prayer that something is now answering, the boy's locked elbow begins to bend and his arm begins to sag; the fingers begin to close again into a fist and then stop. For a moment the hand wavers and then

I slammed the heel of my hand into the center of my forehead to clear these phantoms away. Behind me there was a frenzied snap and crackle of wet bushes as Jo and whatever she was holding back continued to struggle. I put my hands inside the split in the canvas like a doctor spreading a wound. I yanked. There was a low ripping sound as the roll tore the rest of the way up and down.

Inside was what remained of them—two yellowed skulls, forehead to forehead as if in intimate conversation, a woman's faded red leather belt, a molder of
clothes . . . and a heap of bones. Two ribcages, one large and one small. Two sets of legs, one long and one short. The early remains of Sara and Kito Tidwell, buried here by the lake for almost a hundred years.

The larger of the two skulls turned. It glared at me with its empty eyesockets. Its teeth chattered as if it would bite me, and the bones below it began a tenebrous, jittery stirring. Some broke apart immediately; all were soft and pitted. The red belt stirred restlessly and the rusty buckle rose like the head of a snake.

“Mike!”
Jo screamed.
“Quick, quick!”

I pulled the sack out of the carry-bag and grabbed the plastic bottle which had been inside. Lye stille, the Magnabet letters had said; another little wordtrick. Another message passed behind the unsuspecting guard's back. Sara Tidwell was a fearsome creature, but she had underestimated Jo . . . and she had underestimated the telepathy of long association, as well. I had gone to Slips 'n Greens, I had bought a bottle of lye, and now I opened it and poured it, smoking, over the bones of Sara and her son.

There was a hissing sound like the one you hear when you open a beer or a bottled soft drink. The belt-buckle melted. The bones turned white and crumpled like things made out of sugar—I had a nightmare image of Mexican children eating candy corpses off long sticks on the Day of the Dead. The eyesockets of Sara's skull widened as the lye filled the dark hollow where her mind, her prodigious talent, and her laughing soul had once resided. It was an
expression that looked at first like surprise and then like sorrow.

The jaw fell off; the nubs of the teeth sizzled away.

The top of the skull caved in.

Spread fingerbones jittered, then melted.

“Ohhhhhh . . .”

It whispered through the soaking trees like a rising wind . . . only the wind had died as the wet air caught its breath before the next onslaught. It was a sound of unspeakable grief and longing and surrender. I sensed no hate in it; her hate was gone, burned away in the corrosive I had bought in Helen Auster's shop. The sound of Sara's going was replaced by the plaintive, almost human cry of a bird, and it awakened me from the place where I had been, brought me finally and completely out of the zone. I got shakily to my feet, turned around, and looked at The Street.