November Mourns (26 page)

“A label name,” he answered. “The nondramatic precursors to the morality play are to be found in medieval sermon literature.”

“That’s right.”

“Homilies, fables, parables, and other works of moral edification.”

“Sure,” he said.

The agony took him over until he cried out once more, then it receded and his mind cleared.

He turned and saw his body on the ground with his face screwed up in pain, sucking air heavily as he slept. Trickles of rain ran in and out of his open mouth.

Above him stood his mother and Hellfire Christ.

“Oh Mama,” he said, and wondered if this was it.

The Jesus before him wasn’t the Christ in Mrs. Rhyerson’s paint-by-numbers portrait. Nor Old Lady Hester’s picture either. You had trouble visualizing this Christ shaking hands with Conway Twitty or sitting on a cloud with Elvis.

Hellfire Christ’s fists were much larger and the wrists thicker than the gaunt icons you saw hanging on dining room walls. He was a stonemason who walked three miles from his village to the cosmopolitan city of Sepherus, where the Romans were constructing along the Sea of Galilee. He worked to the point of exhaustion because the Romans took one-fourth of his pay in taxes. If it was a bad week, they came to Nazareth and forced the two hundred peasant villagers to cough up their tribute in produce and farm animals. He’s learned a great deal about Plato and Aristotle from the Greek artisans laboring on the floor mosaics.

His features were plain, grim, and heavily wrinkled from the desert sun. The corners of his eyes were crusted with grime and dust. About five-eight and slightly balding. With no easy access to a daily bath he had a repugnant odor that nobody in the Middle East would ever notice. Even Shad’s mother was making a face, sniffing the air.

Jesus, whose voice might or might not have been the voice of Shad’s father, whispered something too low to hear.

You come all this way to meet God and the guy mumbles.

“Shad?”

“Yes, Mama.”

“You . . . are you hurt?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come see me now? Are we going to be together again?” Her face brightened.

“No, Mama. Not just yet. You have to help me.”

“I do?”

“Yes, you have to show me the way out.”

He saw himself now, coughing on the ground. Speckled black phlegm coated his lips. He’d read somewhere that it indicated liver damage. You might survive for a while, but it pretty much meant you were through. Maybe the liver wasn’t on the left side the way he’d thought. Terror seized him again and he looked at Jesus.

No chance at mercy there. Hellfire Christ had a lot on his mind, his burning eyes glancing side to side as he paced around the woods like a prowling animal. He didn’t want sympathy and wouldn’t give any either.

He was as bad as Barabbas, wanting to kill tyrants, cut the throats of soldiers. He stared down at Shad’s body and glowered. Hellfire Christ wasn’t smiling and looked like he’d forgotten how to.

“Shad?”

“Mama, you have to help me!”

He didn’t know which was worse—the fear of dying or the humiliation he felt hearing the squeak in his voice. He gritted his teeth and the frustration yanked at his belly and became something much more awful. He just didn’t want to die up here without getting the answers he was after. He didn’t want to die.

“You should’ve brought Lament,” she said. “The hound might’ve helped.”

Even the ghosts had to get in potshots when they could, say that they told you so.

“Son?”

“I’m here, Mama.”

“Son?”

“I’m still next to you.”

Tears dripped down her cheeks. He’d never seen his mother cry before. She held her hand out to him but he couldn’t touch her.

“I said you should listen to me, son.”

“I know. You were right.”

Her gaze skittered past, then fell on him once more. “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.”

“Enough about Pa. Tell me how to get back to the road.”

“There’s bad will on the road.”

“Just guide me back to it.”

“You can’t return that way. You’ve come too far. You can’t go back. You’ve got to go on. To the harlot.”

Hellfire Christ, his eyes brimming with vengeance, whispered to Shad’s mother again.

She said, “I don’t want to tell him that.”

Oh, Jesus.

Hellfire Christ actually put his hand on Mama, gave her a little shove forward. She said, “No. Please, no.”

“What?” Shad asked.

“Behind you,” she told him. “There.”

Shad had been wrong. Hellfire Christ still knew how to smile. His teeth were tiny and sharp and his leer kept getting wider until you knew for sure he was insane. He must’ve given it to them that way when he was on the cross, spitting down on them, smiling in his scorn. In his last moments, Christ took a piss and really let them know what he thought.

Shad turned.

He didn’t see anything for a second because he was scanning too far ahead. He took a step and hit something at his feet.

Hart Wegg’s corpse had been laid out before him like an offering.

Without a scratch on him, and with his lips tugged into a scant grin.

Hart was twined around the rifle the same way a sleeping child might hold on to a beloved toy. Like the snakes that should have been wreathed around the figure of Hellfire Christ on the Gabriels’ cross.

“But he was your man,” Shad said to the mountains. “And Jerilyn was your woman, she loved you. They died smiling.” And then hissing, so much louder than any of the rattlers. “But not my sister! She wasn’t yours!”

He spun back and his mother was gone. Hellfire Christ stood a yard away, and then a foot, and then an inch until they were nose to nose, and this Messiah stared into Shad’s eyes. His rage was no different than what Shad felt himself. It had nothing to do with fighting for freedom or redemption or heaven’s love. You were simply crazy with hate.

They both reached for each other’s throat, and when he touched God, Shad woke in agony and retched black blood across his own chest.

SOMETIMES HE STOOD OUTSIDE THE MISERY AND
watched his body lurch and crawl through the woods.

It had stopped raining. The rags around his belly were gummy with red mud and stuck with foliage and moss, which helped to seal the wound.

His sister’s hand appeared only once, on an incline as he began to flounder downhill. She waved him upward through the brush and he turned and followed and kept stumbling on.

Where’d the story go
? he thought, having trouble remembering how to find his next page. He might have already reached the end of it but was just too foolish to realize it. Like those people who sit in the movie theater watching the end credits roll and say to one another,
Is that it? Is it over? No, can’t be.
Looking around at the rest of the audience, checking the faces of strangers as they proceeded by.
It is? That’s all? The movie’s over? Huh? Well . . . that sucked ass!

His tenacity proved more powerful than his dread. The fear that had overwhelmed him earlier had slowly been replaced by the understanding that death had already dipped down for him but had chosen not take him. He wasn’t finished yet with what he had to do.

Why had Hart Wegg been killed? Or Jerilyn? Or Megan? What purpose did it serve to keep Shad alive in the face of so much murder?

The woods thinned and shifted into a sparse cherry orchard. A note of memory chimed at the back of his mind and he began to move faster. Everywhere he touched the diseased bark of the spindly trees his hands came away covered with runny purple sap. The fruit was dying.

A surge of strength filled him and he pushed on until he broke into a clearing. He heard the truck horns nearby, wailing on Route 18.

Shad went to his knees for a minute, panting heavily, tried to get back to his feet, and couldn’t make it. He rolled over onto his back and let out a gurgling cry. He had nothing left and hoped he’d come far enough for them to find him.

It took a while but eventually the pumpkin-headed kid appeared, staring down into Shad’s face. The boy made a flat wheezing sound like calling an animal. It brought out another child, this one with arms like flippers and no bones in his legs, who hopped and crept closer, mewling. The distant corners of the yard stirred. A spineless kid with slashes for nostrils came squirming through the high grass.

Megan had led him back to Tandy Mae Lusk’s farm, to the ill children, to her own mother.

PART III

December
Preys

Chapter Seventeen

THE CHILDREN CROWDED AROUND HIS BED.
The hydrocephalic and the mute, and those with clawlike hands and others who stared at him with big fishy eyes that never blinked. It made him wince, thinking how close he’d come to being kin to these kids. Tandy Mae and her cousin had been damn busy out here in Waynescross, building their family.

Shad lay on a thick goose-feather mattress under heavy blankets. The warmth and comfort drove him down toward sleep. He tried to stay awake but kept fading, his mind tumbling, until a strong male voice he recognized came into the room.

There were three hypodermics first, two in his belly and one in his upper leg. An IV kept popping out of his arm until the fourth try. Then the sewing needle went in and out of his flesh, in and out, all over the place. First his side, then his chest, and now, hell, he was being turned over and they were sewing up his ass.

He felt the splashing of his own blood as it spattered in one direction then dribbled away in another. The stains would never come out of the sheets or the pillows but he knew they wouldn’t throw anything away.

Shad drifted forward and back, and the pain was bad but not nearly as bad as before. He was no longer consumed by despair. The tranquilizers helped. His nerves had tightened. His hands formed into fists and he drove them against the bruised meat of his legs.

He angled aside in bed and saw Doc Bollar sleeping in a chair beside him, his doctor’s bag and a pot of coffee on the floor, the ceiling light on but three of the four bulbs burned out.

Night had fallen and the shimmering sky lapped through the window and across the blankets. The pumpkin-headed kid walked past the open doorway, peeked in, and caught Shad’s eye. The boy eased open the tiny jaws beneath the behemoth skull, and said, “You should sleep.”

Shad did.

He woke with a heavy aching deep in his belly but was mostly numb everywhere else. He tried to move and managed to roll up on one shoulder about three inches. That was it. Craning his neck, he could look over the edge of the bed and see bloody towels and rags on the floor. Unstrung catgut and rubber gloves. Clots of dried mud and moss, shards of glass, thorns and wood splinters.

Doc Bollar had a couple days of white whiskers on his face, and his heavily seamed face was clenched with tension. He hung himself awkwardly in the ladder-back chair as if he was uncomfortable and had piles from sitting in the Lusk outhouse to do his business.

Shad had never seen the man where he didn’t look like he’d just woken up five minutes before and had dressed without a mirror. His thin hair ran into one wild tuft that flapped backwards off his skull like the lid of a silver creamer flipping open. Doc was small and getting smaller every year, hunched with excruciatingly sharp shoulder blades jabbing up at his shirt. Thin except for his feet, which were so large you kept waiting for him to take off his brown clown shoes and show you it was all a joke. It made you think that without those big feet he’d go spiraling out the window like a stuck balloon.

His eyes opened, spun for a second, then immediately focused into a glare. “You know where you are, Shad Jenkins?”

“Yes. How long’s it been?”

“Three days.”

You couldn’t get away from symbolism no matter what you did to yourself.

“Who else is here?” he asked.