November Mourns (18 page)

Heading north to Jonah Ridge and the old train trestle, Shad kept trying to see it the way it had once been. A hundred years ago, in a different life, he might’ve brought Elfie Danforth up here to go a’courtin’, a picnic basket on his arm, with her parents following at a respectful distance behind them.

But other scenes kept pushing in. Imagining how it must’ve been with the wagons carrying entire families up this way, dying from cholera or yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung onto the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life. Peace officers, doctors, and town fathers dragging their friends and neighbors up the trail. If only they’d trusted themselves enough to even attempt a quarantine, instead of carrying out their duties cold-heartedly. Driving up to the gorge to pitch their own kin off the cliffs.

You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear. Even now, if he missed his chance and wound up a casualty in the bramble forest, he hoped Dave would have sense enough not to list it as a “death by misadventure.”

Despite the ’Stang’s mass and power around him, his chest grew tight and his breath hitched. Already this journey was getting to him and he hadn’t even hit the outskirts of town. How the hell was he going to handle it on his own?

He decided to park and take the trail up by foot. He thought maybe he’d spot something—or something might spot him—that could prove to be useful. If he didn’t ever come back down, he hoped Tub Gattling would discover the car, get the window fixed and help Pa find another buyer. At least Shad’s ghost wouldn’t be stuck in the backseat for eternity. You had to take what good fortune you could get.

If he’d planned this pilgrimage through to the end, and if rationality held any small part of it, he would’ve packed a rucksack. Brought water and provisions, a flashlight, a compass. Shad looked back down the road at the ’Stang and wondered if he should use logic at all. He took a step toward the car and stopped, the chill wind patting him down like the hands of children.

He realized then he could only follow his gut, his mama’s call, and Megan’s beckoning hand to show him the way. There was a feeling of abstinence to it, where he had to go in wearing only what was on his back. The purity of the act would have to carry him through.

Shad worked his way up the rise toward high ground dense with oak hammocks and heavy underbrush, the willows bowing in the crosswinds coming over the precipice in the distance. On the other side he saw the squat arch of Scutt’s Peak as the sun broke bronzed and crimson around it.

At a bend in the track he looked beyond the dark canopy of scrub and felt his attention being pulled toward the Pharisee. Did it prove that was the direction he should go? Or only that his enemy was much stronger than him and moving Shad blindly to his reckoning?

He should’ve brought the dog. He felt more alone and uncomfortable here than in lockup after Jeffie O’Rourke got tossed in solitary for killing the warden.

The woods closed in and solidified around him with the wild ash and birch drooping, the briar that could shred a man as badly as razor wire. The land was littered with shards of glass and flattened beer cans. You could see where the lover’s lane portion of the road came to an end. Even the horny kids knew not to go beyond a certain point. They cluttered their area and their tire tracks shredded the scrub. As if a line had been toed in the dirt and nobody went past where the fields ended and the thickets began.

The terrain sloped into stands of knotted white and slash pine to the west, and the area diverged into more dirt paths leading into the black groves. Stands of spruce almost appeared blue in the rippling light. He’d traveled over a mile on foot when he finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail.

Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. It was as clear and distinct to him now as it had been when the prison bus had brought him past the gate that first day.

If there was murder waiting for him, it hadn’t shown itself yet.

Tushie Kline had never fully understood the need for chapters in a book. It had been one element of reading that Shad had never been able to teach him. Tushie’s mind was set up to run from the beginning of a thing straight through to its end. He’d ask Shad at each break, “Where’d the story go?” Always having trouble remembering that you had to turn the next page to find it again.

“Where’s my story going now?” Shad said.

He came to the divide and the Pharisee Bridge, the timber trestle that spanned a hundred yards across the gorge to Jonah Ridge.

Bulldozers would’ve driven up Gospel Trail to push over the trees and clear ground for new track. Men tied by ropes would’ve dangled over the cliffs to hand-bore holes and set charges, pegged down so they wouldn’t blow away in the crosswinds. The pilings on which the trestle rested had been driven deep into the cliff rock on both sides. The rugged walls of the gorge bordered the Chatalaha River for over a mile here, where the waters broke into a series of long, violent rapids directly beneath. Shad looked at the wild forests on the other side of the ravine and felt like he was about to leave something behind forever.

Gnarled firs twined along the path where the railroad ties and tracks had been uprooted. The torn and abandoned rails left behind a wake now heavy with gopher nests. The ties themselves had long since been ripped free and probably recycled farther south. Camps of men would’ve been strung through the hills, putting it all down, then tearing it back up again two decades later. Maybe the same workers, or their sons.

Shad put his foot on the first rail and got an odd jounce of exhilaration from it.

There were gaps in the tarred planks of the trestle, some only a couple of inches wide. The platform had rotted away by a half foot or more in some spots. You could stand here and imagine the highballing freight coming through at two in the morning, shaking up the mountains. The drunk miners would’ve come out here to play chicken, stand their ground as long as they could before diving aside. There was about twelve inches of safety space between the rail and the edge of the trestle itself.

There was hardly any embankment at all on either slope, just a sheer drop down to the river and the pilings and support beams driven into the rocky sides of the cliffs.

If you made a misstep now, you wouldn’t stop falling for more than half a mile. The hot-air drafts blowing up through the gorge would bounce you end over end and slow you down just enough that you wouldn’t croak from shock. You’d be awake and aware the whole ride down, thinking,
holy fuck.

It must’ve been a big deal for kids years ago to walk from one side to the other on the rails. They must’ve known the schedule perfectly and timed the trains coming, then sat on the side posts as the cars crossed. Train speed couldn’t have been more than twenty miles an hour, with the mining cars stacked up behind. But the bridge, even in its prime, would’ve shaken and rattled like the apocalypse. The Pharisee would’ve felt like it was about to come down at any second.

You had to be aware of the symbols that put you through your paces, so that later on, you didn’t sound like an idiot. Crossing a rickety bridge and heading into the backwoods. Taking nothing along, not even a light.

When the men passed this story on, they’d snicker into their beer and shake their heads. Any damn fool knows not to travel up on the ridge without at least a rifle, a canteen, and a bag of trail mix. If you twisted your knee and got stuck outside all night, you could be as good as dead.

Shad kept moving over the trestle, keeping to the rail where he could progress foot over foot like walking a balance beam. He didn’t trust those planks at all, staring through the holes and seeing the roiling waters far below.

When he finally made it to the other side he stopped there, a little surprised that he hadn’t been ambushed. It seemed like the place for it.

He scanned the forests heavy with pockets of snarled catclaw brambles and briars. The musty scent rose from the matted leaves everywhere. It got you contemplating on who had died in there and who might still be in hiding. Who might be stuck and waiting for your help.

He walked over to the nearest sticker bush and ran his finger over a thorn. With the right equipment, could they tell one scratch from another? If some forensic specialist had examined Megan instead of Doc Bollar, could they have accurately pinpointed where it had happened? Which barb had cut her cheek?

He hiked for over an hour into the backwoods of Jonah Ridge. A creek wound away in front of him, straggling through the forest on a downslope and careening over rocks worn to a sleek polish. Shad kneeled, washed his face, and wet down his hair in the icy stream. About twenty yards ahead he saw the water break wide over something too white to be a rock. He walked to it, reached into the current, and came up with a dimpled plastic container of moon.

The only people he knew who liked to keep their shine cold were Red and Lottie Sublett. Shad had to be close to their place.

He took a tap of the whiskey and spit it out. It wasn’t Luppy Joe’s or any of the usual makers. Someone was using an old car radiator as a still, and the lingering fluid tainted the liquor. Red must be making his own.

Shad kept moving along the trail, watching for his sister. Over the next incline, as he parted the drifting branches still wet with dew, he spotted a shack that leaned so far to the left you could reach out the window on that side and touch the ground. Beyond it, a few twisted apple trees and a pumpkin patch took up about a half acre of partially cleared field.

There was a small garden behind the shanty with a couple rows of lettuce and thin, high-growing corn that was mostly dying. To one side sat a rabbit hutch with a skinning knife jabbed into the top of the wooden box.

Lottie Sublett sat on a carpet of pine needles, in the process of diapering four infants. These were the premature quadruplets that had shown up while Shad was in the can. The babies kicked out with stunted legs and held up their deformed fists, fingers missing from nearly every hand. The infants tried to suck their thumbs but only two of them had any.

Five other children clambered and cowered around her, most of them barefoot and dressed only in ragged overalls. The oldest was a boy no more than thirteen.

The November breeze had grown colder but none of Red Sublett’s brood looked to be uncomfortable. What did it do to your nervous system, that kind of life? When your parents were brother and sister? Did nature bury your nerve endings so deep in your flesh that you couldn’t feel somebody else’s sins?

Lottie glanced up and gaped toothlessly at him. She flinched so harshly that the ill child she’d been diapering flipped over like a griddle cake.

The years had forced their raw corruption on her, the trials of such extreme motherhood written in her face. What did you call it when a woman had so many children in so few years? Her body wracked by such burden, day in and out, month after month. She had stretch marks on her neck, along her jawline, and on just about every bald inch of her he could see. What man makes his own sister live this way?

Lottie got to her feet, peered at him, finally tilted her head in recognition. “You,” she said. “I know you a bit, don’t I? From a few years back.”

“That’s right. My name is Shad Jenkins.”

The infant who’d been flopped like a flapjack sprang over again on his belly. It started creeping and mewling like an animal that had never been given a name. It looked at Shad and started toward him, like it wanted to take a bite out of him.

“Your pa’s the carpenter,” Lottie said.

“Yes.”

“Jenkins. Ah yuh, so you are. What you doing this way? You come to visit on Red? He ain’t here right now, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. Had a red deer out behind the house and Red took a shot but missed the heart. He’s out there someplace tracking it so we can have somethin’ ’sides hare stew. Or are you meanin’ to join them church folk over yonder, eh?”

“I thought I might stop in and talk with them some,” Shad admitted.

“You shouldn’t.”

“No?”

“They got strange ways.” She said it with a hint of concern, as if it mattered but not a hell of a lot.

It took Shad back a step. How odd could these people be that a woman with nine inbred kids would call them strange?

“I don’t know much about them,” Shad said.

“They’re snake handlers. They thrill on the venom. Moon ain’t strong enough, I suppose. Got a small settlement a few miles off. We don’t cotton with them much, but we trade supplies if’n we need to. They ain’t bad folks but they got a worshipful way with the snakes. It ain’t right, cavorting like that. It ain’t a blessed church.”

“Did you ever see my sister out on this side of the gorge?”

“Who she?”

“Her name was Megan. She was seventeen, long blond hair.”

“Was?”

“She’s dead now.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Comfort and condolences to you.”

“Thank you.”

“I never run into her.”

“She might’ve come up with a boy. Possibly a man.”

“Only girls that age I seen up this way are them Gabriel girls. Daughters of the man who runs the church. Lucas Gabriel.”

The eldest of her children hobbled over and murmured in her ear, staring at Shad in alarm. She hugged the kid and hummed in his ear for a second, telling him, “No no no. No, Osgood, no.”