Read November Mourns Online

Authors: Tom Piccirilli

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #Brothers and Sisters, #Sisters, #Suspense Fiction, #Thrillers

November Mourns (22 page)

BOOK: November Mourns
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Gabriel held his chin up in Shad’s direction. That proved to be the only gesture he needed to make for everyone to quiet down. Some folks had already left, others didn’t seem certain of where they should go or what they should be doing.

“Not many men from town would share a plate of food from our table.”

“Why’s that?” Shad asked.

“There was talk a hundred years ago that my forefathers were cannibals.”

So now things were going to be silly.

Shad got the feeling that Gabriel was testing him, but he’d expected as much. Cannibals though? He guessed everybody had to play out their dark secret, no matter how goofy it sounded.

Rebi brought him a slice of cranberry pie for dessert. He couldn’t put it past these folks to have tossed in a fingernail or a couple strands of hair to get a reaction.

“Anybody remember that talk besides you?” Shad asked.

“Some, I suspect.”

“I never heard it.” He spooned in a mouthful of pie and swallowed without tasting. Sometimes you pushed back, and sometimes you just played along and considered the angles. Shad stared at the man.

Hart and Howell Wegg ate their dessert too, without any hint that they understood what was going on. Rebi and Jerilyn returned and took up their seats beside him again, but didn’t eat.

“You want to know about us, don’t you?” Lucas Gabriel said. His voice had a sigh to it, but the sigh didn’t come out either.

“Yes.”

“Why’s that? Not because you’re lookin’ for the Lord.”

The man was right, but you couldn’t give anything away this early in the game. “It’s presumptuous for you to say that, Mr. Gabriel.”

“I reckon that’s true. I got no defense for such boldness.”

“We all have our reasons.”

“So then, name some of yours, Mr. Jenkins. Why have you come to us?”

“I’m not certain,” Shad said. If you straddled the line, no one could trouble you for being on one side or the other.

“Good, I can appreciate a man in agitation who’s not afraid to admit it.”

Shad didn’t think he’d admitted to any such thing, but the man’s assuming nature was something to keep notice of. “My sister recently died.”

Murmurs went around the table, the usual kind words and sympathies. The Wegg brothers kept staring, vacuous but amenable. Rebi licked her lips, a gesture of sex and girlish fidgeting.

Gabriel began to paw at his chin, the scars on his arms twisting in the light like snakes themselves. “So then, perhaps you do seek to ease your burden.”

“Everyone seeks that, don’t they?”

“I do believe you’re right.”

“She was part of the Youth Ministry in Preacher Dudlow’s church down in the hollow.”

“A fine man. I’ve met the reverend in town on occasion, and at some of the Christian tent gatherings when traveling ministers come to visit.”

“I was wondering if you’d ever seen her up this way. She was seventeen, long blond hair?” He couldn’t believe that this was the only way he could describe his sister, and he wasn’t even sure if she’d still had long hair. “Her name was Megan.”

“No,” Gabriel said. “We have few visitors, and I recall each of them well.” He glanced around the table and others shook their heads and agreed they’d never met her. “Was there something we could have done for her?”

“I don’t know. I was away for a time. I’m sad to say I didn’t know her well anymore.”

Lucas Gabriel grunted loudly. “Loss of a family member is one of our most painful trials. It’s made so much worse if there are regrets or unresolved circumstances.”

Time to divert the course of the conversation, allow the man to have his say. Shad could see that Gabriel was beginning to get a touch antsy, waiting to cut loose. “Does your sect have a name?”

The man caught on to the word—sect, sounding so much like cult—and the glimmer in his eyes seemed to flare. “No, we believe that the denomination of churches and religions has more to do with man’s hubris than his following the Lord. Shall I tell you about us? Our history?”

“Sure.”

“Are you familiar with Mark 16:18?”

“No,” Shad said, though he realized it had to be the verse about snakes. Something about laying hands on. If you couldn’t quote the passage word for word, then you couldn’t say you actually knew it. That’s how it had been back in Becka Dudlow’s Bible class.

“It’s the central passage that forms the core of our faith. ‘
They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
’ From that verse came the original belief of the snake handlers.”

“Everybody’s got to have their own blessing,” Shad said. “Makes them feel like God’s giving them extra attention.”

“Well, I’d say you’re probably right about that, much of the time. We want to earn our consideration. My great-grandpa Saul was one of the founders of the Holiness Church in eastern Tennessee. Used to bring the serpents with him to the camps and down into the mines.”

“How’d that go over with the other men?”

“Not well, at first.”

“I’d guess not.”

The others at the table had heard the tale before, but expectation and curiosity still grew in the air, the mood fluctuating, as if they had never heard the end of the story.

“At the close of the nineteenth century, the industrialization and factories of Moloch were spreading down through the South. The rich owners began to turn their backs on God and praise only silver. They replaced our farming and our way of life. They paid poor wages for unskilled labor, offered only high-priced rental properties and unsanitary conditions. The bitterness of men took hold and they became violent.”

“Tell what happened, Daddy,” Rebi said. Jerilyn let out a soft snort that only Shad could hear.

“The snakes saved us,” Gabriel said. “God gave us the signs of his power. We followed his will. We bore witness and struggled with the serpents, and sometimes managed to heal the dying with the venom.”

Shad had talked to a couple of drug dealers in the slam who’d come out of the river bottoms and whose fathers had mined those same mountains. On the outside they drove Mercedes and Porsches, had houses in Miami, and yet they still fucked around with snake handling. It wasn’t poverty that pushed them. It was the primitive urge to try yourself against the hand of fate.

The glass of the windows vibrated with a gentle staccato.

“Thing was, all of them were actually afraid of snakes,” Lucas Gabriel said. He shifted in his seat until he was aimed entirely at Shad. “Saul most of all. Rattlers terrified him. His baby brother had died in the crib after being bitten. They knew firsthand the kind of agony one would go through. All of them had seen congregation members die. They went to church and were visited by the spirit of the Lord, and yet they never knew if they were going to get back out the door alive. If not, at least they died in service.”

That was about as old-school as you could get. “Where’s the cannibalism come in?”

“One summer the green timbers of a mine gave way and there was a cave-in. They got most of the men out safely, but it took rescuers seven days to dig Saul free. He was trapped alone there in a far chamber, except for the snakes. When he was rescued, the lower half of Saul’s left leg was gone. People figured that he got so hungry he actually ate it.”

There was an even more subtle analysis going on now. Shad allowed himself to be set up, and said, “He was driven to that extreme in only a week?”

“No, a’course not, but that’s the way legends get started. Saul’s leg had been crushed and gangrene had set in. He surely would’ve died from his wounds, but he claimed the snakes fed off his rotting leg and saved him.”

“Maybe it’s true.”

“Maybe it is, at that.” Shad knew he was expected to grin but not laugh at the miraculous twist, so he did. Gabriel joined in for a moment. “After that, Saul came out here with his wife and sons, my grandfather among them, and together they built this house. This hamlet grew up around the faith.”

Looking down to take another bite of pie, Shad saw that it had been cleared along with all the other plates. Only a few folks remained around the table, and some were talking and appeared to have been deep in conversation much of the time. He’d been focused too sharply on Gabriel.

It was dark outside and a weariness began to settle on him. He’d been up since dawn with almost no sleep and had covered at least fifteen miles of rugged terrain on foot. Jerilyn’s shoulder pressed him from one side and Rebi sort of nuzzled him on the other. They both smelled faintly of jasmine, which he hadn’t noticed before.

Gabriel pursed his lips and appeared to be considering his words. “Will you stay the night? You appear to be exhausted, and I doubt you’ll find your way back to Jonah Ridge in the dark. Pardon my saying so but you don’t seem to be an expert mountain traveler.”

“I’m not.”

“One misstep on the Pharisee and you’ll meet the Lord earlier than I presume you’re expecting.”

“Aren’t you holding your services tonight?”

“No, that’ll be tomorrow afternoon. The roundup and the storm have agitated the snakes. I want to give them a chance to calm down some.”

All right, now it wasn’t a fairy tale anymore, but the beginning of a dirty joke. Traveling salesman staying overnight with the farmer’s two luscious young daughters. There were so many punch lines he couldn’t decide on any one of them.

“So, you’ll stay?” Gabriel asked.

“Yes, if you’ll have me.” Where else would he go?

“Of course we will. Jerilyn will make up one of the guest rooms for you. Although the house seconds as a communal center of sorts there’s still plenty of free space. We’ll talk more in the morning about your sister if you like.”

This huge home just for Gabriel’s family and the snakes. Shad could hear them thumping and knocking about in their containers somewhere deeper in the house. “Thank you.”

The sisters looked at him and he looked back, wondering how far into perdition he’d already fallen and how much further he had left to go.

 

Chapter Fourteen

 

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT SHAD AWOKE
naked on his feet, standing at the side of the bed. Jerilyn sat next to him, her open hand on his slick back. The room was filled with a muted pink light from where she’d thrown her slip over the small nightstand lamp. He was breathless and his chest hair was heavy with sweat.

He was aware of the nearness of her beautiful body, and the pattern of drying salt on her belly and between her breasts. A fine mist of perspiration still coated her flesh. That heady scent of jasmine wafted through the room. Shad’s breath came in bites. There was a remote sense of satisfaction within him—no, it was satiation. He struggled to remember their lovemaking and couldn’t. Your own mind was sometimes the worst gyp of all.

She grinned and her teeth were bright in the shadows. “You’re not him, but it’s okay, we still had fun together.” Jerilyn leaned back upon the pillows, spread herself over the sheets. “You’re a nice-looking boy. I like your body. And those streaks of white hair.”

He’d missed so much of what had happened that he felt dispossessed and displaced before her. He should be flattering her or cooing other soft words, but the proper time had already passed by.

“Who are you waiting for?” he asked.

“It’s not for you to know.”

Shad tried to search out the truth in Jerilyn’s eyes, but saw only a glistening of love that wasn’t for him. “You really write him letters and send them off on the creek?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you upset that he doesn’t get to read them?”

“He does read them. He quotes from them when he comes to me.”

“But you said you thought I was him. Don’t you know who he is?”

She kissed him.

A storm now shrieked outside, blustery winds tearing at the clapboards and tossing shingles. The rafters groaned and creaked furiously. When he’d moved Tushie Kline up to reading poems, Shad had to explain about metaphor and symbolism. How what happened in a man was paralleled in the heavens. As above, so below.

Tushie Kline marveled at that, and asked, “Like the depletion of the ozone could be a symbol for man’s spiritual bankruptcy? Ain’t that some fucked-up shit right there?”

BOOK: November Mourns
5.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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