November Mourns (4 page)

While tugging at his thinning forelock he missed a stop sign in the middle of town. The blaring horns caught his attention and brought him back to the road, but not in time. He panicked and stomped the brake, skidding up a curb. The ’Stang did a slow, complete 360 in the intersection out in front of Chuckie Eagleclaw’s place, bumped the Civil War cannon on a little plot of turf there. His door sprang open and the guy flopped out into traffic. He managed to make it to his feet before getting smeared by Chuckie’s mom, who was turning the corner in her pickup, coming to bring Chuckie his lunch. Hush puppies and sweet-potato pancakes.

Not even a scratch on the car from where it hit the cannon. Chuckie came running outside to check on his mother, shouting, “Ma, you all right?”

She shouted back, “The hell you worrying about me for? I ain’t the one snarled in the fan belt.”

It gave you strength, being directly connected to death via the machine. Just driving it around in circles, going out to the highway but never getting on, passing the exit and heading back again. It made you feel invincible in an ass-backwards way. Like the black angel was sitting behind you, watching over you so long as you didn’t piss him off. That was the trick.

Shad put the ’Stang back in gear and rolled slowly toward his father’s house.

Something about the place suggested sorrow. Maybe the lay of the land, or because it had been built—mortar, brick, and log—by Pa while Shad’s mother lay dying of pneumonia, in a trailer at the edge of the grounds.

The lengthening shadow of her headstone on the foothill struck the road when the moon rose halfway across the sky. Shad never walked through it.

Mags would be buried up there now as well. It would take Pa a full five months, perhaps six, to cut the stone from the quarry and chisel and smooth the marker. He would put more love into the rock than he’d ever shown anybody in life. It was the man’s way, and Shad felt no resentment about it. You couldn’t pass judgment on your own father, no matter what he’d done. There were boundaries of blood that couldn’t be crossed.

Almost midnight, and Pa sat on the porch in his rocker, a hound pup flopped at his feet, shivering. The dog’s name was Lament. Every dog Pa ever owned was named Lament. There was a reason for that, but Shad didn’t know it.

Somehow the cold never bothered his father, regardless of how far the temperature dropped. Even after the ice crystals formed in his beard stubble, he’d still sit there rocking, waiting.

Pa was playing chess against himself, as usual, moonlight flickering in the polished, hand-carved quartz pieces. The old man made only three or four moves a night. He took the game more seriously than others might think—it gave his life an even greater simplicity than anyone would suppose. He just didn’t know what to do with himself since his third wife had left him.

The shotgun, always loaded, remained propped across his father’s knee.

Collar up, with the heat of his grief keeping him warm as he edged the ’Stang forward. The car helped to keep him in the past, where he needed to be.

A shiver worked between his shoulders as he thought of Mags’s empty room inside the house. He gripped the steering wheel tight and drove through the shadow of Mama’s headstone, teeth clenched. Symbols like these had the power to torment. You always had to be on your toes.

He felt it again, that somebody in the hills was thinking about him, worried, bitter.

Shad parked and walked up the porch. His father looked over and a rare smile crossed his lips. “Hello, son.”

“Hi, Pa.”

“You should’ve let me meet you.”

Shad shook his head. “I preferred it this way. Gave me a chance to reacquaint myself. See some of the folks gathering out in the fields, down by the river.”

“Any of them right enough in their minds to say hello?”

“A few.”

“Can’t expect more than that.”

You could, but there wasn’t much point to it. His father furrowed his brow but said nothing else. He stared at Shad’s hands as if inspecting them for prison tats, wondering exactly what tales the new scars might betray. Brawling, knifing, the puckered flesh around his wrists from the tight handcuffs.

His father handled grief and remorse even worse than Shad. You didn’t want to think of him as a hypersensitive beat-down disappointment, too often lost in self-pity, but there it was. The old man had discarded everything that ever belonged to each of his wives, damn near every dish, sheet, or couch cushion they’d ever touched. He walked around his own home like it was tearing off his skin.

His memories were already too powerful and he didn’t need anything more to remind him of the experiences. Pa couldn’t bear to own anything with a history that he hadn’t made with his own hands.

Karl Jenkins had turned sixty-three years old last month, and he’d finally aged into his flat broad face as hard-featured as bedrock. Firm-muscled and compact, he contained a coiled energy that made him always seem a second away from leaping forward into your chest. Pa moved with a bearish and terrible grace, a relentless sense of force.

He usually kept his thick silver hair short, but since Mags had died no one had cut it for him. Shad liked how it had grown out, giving him an easygoing appearance that offset his impenetrable dark eyes. Shad had started to go gray when he was seventeen, and now at twenty-two he had white at his temples and a patch in front that at first glance made him appear older than his own father.

Pa had passed a determined sort of melancholia down to his children, but not much of his despair. The man’s first wife had run off with a farm equipment salesman trying to sell them a used corn thresher. It didn’t take much to seduce and persuade folks to leave Moon Run Hollow.

His second wife—Shad’s mother—had died less than a year into their marriage, three weeks after Shad’s birth and long before the final log had been shaved and laid into the roof of the house.

You could wind up with a wretched history without having to do a damn thing on your own. Just sit around long enough and it would just happen around you.

His third wife, Tandy Mae Lusk—Megan’s mother—had given birth to Mags, stuck around for about three years, then skipped town with her own first cousin whom she’d always been in love with. She hadn’t gotten far. They lived less than twenty miles away in Waynescross now, burdened with a brood of crippled ill children. Two with flippers instead of arms, one hydrocephalic with a wet brain and enormous head, another with no bone in his jaw and hardly any spine.

Mags never saw her mother again. But on occasion Shad would drive out to the neglected Lusk farm near a diseased cherry orchard, watch the kids rolling and crawling around the yard, and try to figure out exactly what it all meant.

Pa wouldn’t ask any questions, and he’d never bring Mags up on his own. He propped the shotgun in the corner, pulled a beer off the porch rail, and passed it to Shad, gesturing for him to sit. Shad slid into the love seat swing and pretended to sip from the can.

His father had never asked him to play chess. Pa did on his own, at his own pace, in order to keep his own footing in the world. He sat in the night for his own reasons, some of which Shad could guess at, most he never wanted to learn. You had to let some things slide.

They’d have to get around to Megan’s death slowly. The weight of Mags’s presence was a solid pressure on Shad’s shoulders. He could feel it there caressing his back the way she used to do when he’d wrenched himself chopping wood. The women in his life were always rubbing him, patting him like,
Baby, baby, all will be fine, go sleep now.
He knew it was his own fault.

It was going to take a while to think of her in the past tense. He still occasionally spoke of his mother as if he’d just seen her a couple of days before, instead of never having met the woman at all. When you needed your family, you built one from whatever you had on hand.

He peered through the window, but the inside of the house was too dim for him to see anything. The dog sat up, furiously scratched his ear, then lay down again with a lengthy sigh.

“Zeke Hester come around looking for you three or four days ago,” Pa said. “He was keeping tabs on when you got out.”

“Did he hassle you?”

“No, but he’s got a short memory, that boy. Doesn’t quite recall what happened to him last time.”

“He remembers.”

“Not well enough, I reckon.”

Maybe that was true, maybe not. Shad supposed he’d find out soon enough. The pride in his father’s voice was more jarring than he’d expected. If only Pa had ever sounded that way about something that hadn’t sent Shad to jail. “Did he say anything about Mags?”

“You don’t want to know what he said about her. I went for the shotgun but he was already gone by the time I got back to the door.”

Pa was like a cop standing watch over a crime scene. The body removed, but the blood still on the floor.

“He’s a fool, Pa. He isn’t even worth getting mad about.”

“That your advice to me after spending two years downstate for trouncing hell out of him?”

“But I didn’t get mad,” Shad said.

“You split your own hairs, son, I’ll split mine. That’s the way of it.”

“Sure enough.”

The rage started working through Shad again, but he kept it down where it could be handled. It wasn’t anger though, not the usual kind. He swallowed a groan, felt the living confusion inside him swell for an instant, then settle. The hound let out a whine, keeping an eye on Shad. Zeke Hester had wanted Megan, there was no other way to say it, but she’d always managed to elude him as she flourished into womanhood. Shad did what he could, which amounted to giving Zeke a few even-handed threats that the guy was too ignorant to heed. He simply may not have understood what Shad was getting at.

It went on like that for a couple of years, until the night Zeke caught her behind Crisco Miller’s still on Sweetwater Creek. While Shad was just starting to put the butter knives back out for Elfie, Zeke was throwing his all at Mags. He battered her pretty good, fractured her wrist and dislocated her left knee, but he never got what he was after. Mags had hellfire in her when she got going. She had Pa’s hands, small but hard with meat to them.

She succeeded in slugging Zeke in the mouth hard enough to crack a rotted front tooth he had hanging among the rest of the brown train wreck. The pain catapulted him sideways, and she kicked free and crawled into the tree line to hide.

She refused to go to the doctor and only lay in bed for a weekend before she got back to doing her chores. Mags had a resolve that Shad had never acquired. They talked a lot during those couple of days, but he couldn’t remember a word of it. He was having a difficult time even hearing her voice nowadays. It was the kind of thing that made you knot your fists and drive them into your temples, trying to loosen memories. The only voice she had was the impact left on him.

When Shad caught up with Zeke Hester outside of Griff’s Suds’n’Pump, he broke the bastard’s jaw, cheek, nose, and left arm in three places.

True enough, he hadn’t gotten mad. A cool lucidity had somehow draped over him, a calm he hadn’t experienced before. By the time Zeke was weeping on his belly and baying in pain, Shad felt only an ample amount of pity and sadness.

When Sheriff Increase Wintel asked him why it had happened, Shad refused to explain. Some circumstances you kept quiet about if you could. When you managed it, you found your assurance in the silence.

Perhaps it was a talent he’d picked up from his father. He willingly took the deuce in prison and managed to finish three semesters’ worth of college courses. All in all, he’d read about a book a day for the two years he was inside, and he’d only had to watch one man die.

His father studied the chessboard for a minute before he moved the white bishop.

Shad looked off at the brush-shrouded terrain and tried to discern movement. Already the old caged-in feeling was beginning to overtake him. You could prepare for it but you couldn’t get away from your smallest apprehensions. The dark land led back into the surrounding weed-choked pastures, and the air seemed thick with a sickeningly sweet honeysuckle even at the end of autumn.

“What happened, Pa?”

His father’s perfect control wavered, and the angles of his face fell in on themselves. The old man opened his mouth and shut it again. Cleared his throat and moved the white bishop back where it’d been.

“She never came home.”

Shad waited but his father said nothing more. “The hell does that mean?”

“She went to school like always and just never come back.”

Okay, so he was going to have to pry it loose. Shad flipped the beer can across the porch and stood, moved in on his father. “Tell me about it. That afternoon.”

“You can’t change nothin’, son.”

“I realize that.” His fingers flexed, like he was ushering the words out. “But I need to know. Do it for me. As much as it pains you.”

Pa pulled himself together, sluggishly. He shut his eyes and his chin began to lower to his chest. It stayed there for a while. Shad rapped the chessboard with his knuckles, careful not to jostle the pieces. His father opened his eyes.

“I tried not to get nervous that afternoon,” Pa said. “I thought maybe she went off with that Luvell girl. Malt shop, the junior rodeo over there in Springfield. However they keep busy. You know your sister was a good girl, she doesn’t do what them others all do. When it came evening I made some phone calls but nobody’s seen her. Come ten o’clock I called the sheriff’s office. She’d never been out past that without telling me before. That damn Increase Wintel didn’t pay me no heed, but Dave Fox went off looking right then. He found her the next morning.”