November Mourns (31 page)

“No.”

“What’s that?”

He coughed and spit bloody phlegm. His throat burned badly and his voice had a rough, grating squeak to it. “I said no.”

“You sound funny. I would’ve thought he’d have told you about that by now. He asked me to marry him.”

Yes, you might’ve thought your father would tell you something like that. That you had a seventeen-year-old new mom. It might make for a good topic of conversation. “When did he propose?”

“A day or two after the last time you was here.”

Before he’d gone up Gospel Trail Road.

“Did you agree?”

“A ’course,” she said, like she found it odd he was even asking.

“Why’s my father making coffins?”

“Well, Venn’s dead. That’s who the big one is for. I’m not sure about the others. Maybe he’s going to sell them.”

So that’s the way it was getting now, when you could just drop the fact that your own brother was dead without even a note of sorrow. “What happened to Venn?”

“Dunno. Think his brain just rusted in place until it stopped telling his heart and lungs to work. He didn’t suffer none.”

It made Shad think about the scene this morning again, with Jake and Becka Dudlow on the stump out back of Mrs. Rhyerson’s. “Where’s Hoober?”

“Don’t know that either. Ain’t nobody seen him in over a month. Maybe he left the hollow.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You might be right at that.”

Karl Jenkins crouched near M’am’s front door, hammering at the lumber. His craggy features were fixed with intent, and his deep-set eyes had glazed a bit, the melancholia sort of just rattling around in there. The terrible grace and brutal force within him was barely constrained, and Pa’s lips were scabbed from where he’d been chewing them. Or from where Glide had been gnawing on him.

His father didn’t look up at him.

“Hello, Pa.”

“Hello, son.”

“Dave Fox is dead in our house.”

Pa didn’t appear to be surprised, and kept working with the wood.

“You already knew that, didn’t you? Is that who you’re building this coffin for?”

His father said, “Venn passed on a few days back. They got his body wrapped in the barn. Nobody’s seen Hoober in so long that they’re fearing he’s come to an awful end too.”

But Shad was certain that his father already knew Dave was lying spattered across the bedroom, a few feet from Mags’s last love letter to him.

“Who told you about Dave Fox? Was it Megan? Or did you find a note scuffed in the dirt?”

“You’re talking foolish now, Shad. I’ll hear no more a’that.”

“Or was it Dave himself, Pa? Did Dave come by and tell you he blew his brains out in front of me?”

But Dave wasn’t dead. You didn’t live in the hollow, and you couldn’t die in it either.

“Shad, you’ve gone a little sick, son. That’s what happens when you head up the bad road into them woods. You need to go inside and talk with M’am. She’s gonna help you.”

“Will she?”

“Go on now.”

His father dismissing him was both comforting and insulting. He wanted to shout at Pa and explain how he’d committed murder with his own hands. But Tandy Mae had been right. Once his father had made his peace with Shad going up into the hills, he’d considered his son lost to him. It was an act of will. The same way it took incredible resolve for Pa to ignore Megan’s hand pressing across his cheek.

“I’ve still got more to say to you.”

“I don’t wanna talk no more right now, son. Go on inside.”

Shad realized his father was silently sobbing, the man’s shoulders quivering. It should have startled him but somehow it didn’t. “You were right, Pa. That the dead don’t rest in the hollow.”

His father’s strong palm came up and flattened against Shad’s belly. It came away red and wet. Tears tracked his cheeks. “You’re bleeding, son. Please go on inside now, she’ll help with that too.”

“Sure. Congratulations on the new bride.”

You couldn’t do anything except follow the course laid out in front of you. Megan had been right. You didn’t choose, you were chosen.

Shad stepped to M’am Luvell’s ramshackle pineboard door and tapped as the walls creaked and scraped together, tilting worse than before. His knuckles came away stained with wet moss. If the shack went over, it would crush his father.

The dying bullfrogs continued to roar and scream.

M’am’s voice, dangerous and without the quaint mischief, slid out through the slats like a fishing blade. “Shad Jenkins, you just—”

He didn’t like her tone and walked in without waiting to hear her bidding. The place had lost the hallowed essence that he’d sensed before. The stink of marijuana filled the room. His skin grew clammy and he began to cough uncontrollably. After a minute he checked the window and saw the first patterns of snow emerging in the sky.

Huddled in her chair, M’am Luvell sat wearing only a silk slip, smoking her pipe. The hex woman was sweating even as the temperature dropped. It made him giggle and shake his head. You couldn’t get away from the backass contradictions of this town.

Beside her, set on a table his father had built, stood the old man’s chessboard. They were in midgame, which might have taken days or weeks.

Uncovered from all her sweaters and blankets, M’am’s dwarf body still showed that timeless quality she had. She looked as much like a girl as she did a hag, and the ambiguity struck him as something curious and creepy and very funny.

“You see more of my bare flesh and you get the giggles, boy? Another lady would be shamed and disgraced.”

“But not you.”

It made her cackle. Threads of smoke clung to her teeth. “Take a sight more than that, I reckon.”

“So do I, especially since I wasn’t laughing at you.”

“But you were. At the fact that I get me the sweats in weather like this. I guess it is a sight.”

Like there was nothing else to talk about than how fascinating a seminude dwarf witchy woman might be.

“You made it back alive,” she said. “You should be proud of that. Not many people go up the bad road and come back again. People like us, that is.”

“And who are the people like us?” he asked.

“Those who got special consideration under the Lord.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Sit on the bed. I’m gonna care for your wounds.”

She clambered down from her seat and moved about the shack, so small and familiar with the place that even at her age she somehow managed to scurry. More like a small animal skittering around the place, like something you’d chase after with a broom and set traps for.

He lay back on the bed and watched her brew tea. For a few minutes he slept, and when he woke she had cleaned his belly and the cuts on his scalp. She’d wrapped a cloth around his neck soaked in a cooling fluid. The tea tasted worse than he would’ve guessed but he immediately felt more alert.

After he sat up, she immediately returned to her seat and began smoking again.

“I heard what you said outside,” she told him. “Don’t you worry none on the death of your friend. It’s December. It’s a time meant for dying.”

“So why didn’t I?”

“Considering the size of the bruises on your throat and the hole in your guts, you’re lucky you didn’t. Then again, December ain’t over just yet.” She let out a spurt of cackling that went on for too long.

“I thought you were supposed to ease my mind.”

“I can only do so much.”

“Well, feel free to start whenever you like.”

“She’s with child,” M’am Luvell said, her forehead misted with perspiration. “Your woman, if that’s who she be. That Elfie Danforth.”

It got the heat flowing back through his veins again, and the rage that had abandoned him bucked once, like an engine trying to turn over.

Was this all he was good for? Being baited and toyed with? To what goddamn end? “And you learned that when I was with her only last night?”

M’am sucked on the pipe loudly, holding the smoke in her lungs until her lips fluttered, then letting it out. “Oh, the baby ain’t yours. She been with a lot of other fellas since you been away. I don’t rightly think she knows who the daddy is. But her mama come in here to get some Black Haw jam, and that takes the morning sickness off.”

Now Elfie and her Ma could sit back together on their Uninterrupted Airflow Pillows late at night and order off the shopping channel. Painless Nostril Hair Waxer. A four-gallon tub of Dissolve’a’Grit.

“Even if it’s true, why are you telling me?”

“You mentioned her while you slept. It weighs on your mind that you might have a child born in the hollow. But that baby, it’s a girl, she won’t be yours.”

He let out a long sigh and drew the chill rag from around his neck. “Did you really think that would make me feel better?”

“Boy, it’s my aim to get you on to where you need to go, not to make you spin cartwheels for joy. Did you find what you were after on Gospel Trail Road?”

“No.”

“Then you ain’t done with what you got to do.”

“I know that.”

“You might never be.”

Shad stared at her. “Old woman, are you ever going to tell me anything helpful?”

M’am Luvell tilted her chin and considered on that for a while, nodding as the smoke writhed in the air. “I reckon not.”

“Then shut the hell up!”

“It’s only gonna get worse for you now.”

“You’re as crazy as the rest of them.”

She broke into that wild laughter again that sounded like bones clashing and crushing together, and even after he walked from the shack past his father and the girl, with Lament now loping beside him, the noise followed and managed to drown out the shrieking croaks of the deranged, dying bullfrogs.

THE
’
STANG WAS ALL YOU COULD COUNT ON.

He drove into the mountains with Lament in the passenger seat, past the patch of ground where his sister’s body had lain in the darkness. Where Dave Fox had gingerly placed it after killing her, leaving Megan there alone for hours while he drove around the town as if searching for her.

It began to snow.

He could feel the breath of the two dead guys in the backseat on his hackles. Lament felt it too and started giving sidelong glances, snapping at emptiness.

When Shad parked, Lament hopped out and gazed north along the trail. It took a while for Shad to limp that far. They hiked up and stood where the wagons had unloaded families dying from cholera and yellow fever. The elderly and the children flung from the back of a cart as they weakly argued for life.

You knew you were going to a place designed to make you disappear.

The dead knew something about life that the living didn’t. They knew how it ended.

Lament chased the snowflakes and rolled happily in the mud. He kept trying to get Shad to chase him. Slowly they worked up the rise toward the dense oak and slash pine, with the willows bowing to the ground, beaten in the crosswinds coming across the precipice.

The woods continued to close in as they walked. They finally came to the mold-covered split-rail fence at the top of Gospel Trail Road.

Thousands of feet below, the Chatalaha River boiled at the bottom of the gorge.

Sometimes you could feel your life entering through a new door as another closed behind. You did what you could to stay sane and strong from one moment to the next, but it was never quite enough.

“Where’s my story going now?” Shad asked, and Lament began to whine and nervously turn in circles.

The movement beneath the turnings of the world climbed toward him. Something reached for Shad’s ankle, tightened on him, and began to yank him down. He wondered if he was strong enough to resist. He held for a moment, then started to slide over the edge. It felt powerful enough to be Dave’s fist.

The suicides didn’t sleep. Lament barked and lunged and squealed. Shad grabbed for the dog. We have to save our Laments, they’re the only ones alive who still care for us. Wraiths bit into his legs. His lower back gave way again and the pain made him cry out. He slid farther to the rim, went to one knee, and the wind brought a burst of snow up into his face.

Lament’s howling made a sob break from his chest, and he nearly went over.
The moon,
he thought,
this might only be the moon and the sickness in your mind.
Behind him, Megan’s hand appeared and flashed out to grip his wrist, trying to pull him back up, as the snow thrashed and outlined the rising, reaching forms all around, and he waited to see where the fight would go from here.

TOM PICCIRILLI is the author of thirteen novels, including
A Choir of Ill Children
,
The Night Class
,
A Lower Deep
,
Coffin Blues
, and the forthcoming
Headstone City
. He’s had over 150 stories published, and his short fiction spans multiple genres and demonstrates his wide-ranging narrative skills. He has been a World Fantasy Award finalist and a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner. Visit Tom’s official website, Epitaphs, at
www.tompiccirilli.com
. Tom welcomes email at
[email protected]
.