The Broken Places (33 page)

“Sorrow and joy are part of life,” Jamey said. “Without one, the other isn’t recognizable. We thank God for recognizing it all. We shouldn’t ever take this day for granted. It’s a gift. Everything is good and proper at the right time.”

“I don’t have a house.”

“God will provide.”

“Everything I own is gone,” she said.

“God will provide,” Jamey said.

Caddy looked out the big barn door to see Jason playing chase with some other kids, shadowed on the rolling hills by giant rounds of hay and an old tractor. Jamey stepped in and hugged her. She put her hand to her mouth and tried to steady herself.

“Be happy, Caddy,” Jamey said. “We’re here. We’re alive. We now know the gift the Lord has given us. Without the storm, we are blind. Now we’re prosperous.”

She took her hand from her mouth and shook her head. “Preachers sure have a funny way of looking at the world.”

“Everything is pointless, useless vanity. This is what is everlasting.”

Jamey pulled her in tighter, and for a moment she rested her head on his shoulder. Donation buckets filled with cash and coin. Elvis Presley sang “The Old Rugged Cross” as the air filled with electric light and the smells of meat on the grill. The color of the sky had gone from a deep blue and gray to the deepest shades of red and black, a soft, warm wind blowing over the dinner tables and on into the church.

“There will be times we will be down and out, but this is when we put our pain away,” Jamey said. “Look to that sky and see the promise He made.”

“You think that’s why you came back?” she said.

Jamey nodded. He stepped in front of her, held her face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead.

“There will be a long time of mourning,” Jamey said. “But we have to help these people mend. That’s why we are here. This is providence, not fate.”

“You know what I think?” Caddy asked. “I think we’re finally free of your past. I think this is bigger than us all and we can finally be left hell enough alone.”

“Everybody knows the material world is temporary,” Jamey said. “God’s love is everlasting. Don’t look at this life apart from God. A sovereign God has given us everything for a reason and a purpose, and He takes it away for the same purpose. God is completely in control. He has a purpose for everything. Even storms.”

“You do realize that only a crazy person could see beauty in today?” Caddy said.

Jamey smiled and nodded.
“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, and the mountains quake with their surging.”

“Faith ain’t easy,” she said.

“Easy as stepping off a cliff and hoping for a net.”

Caddy nodded and went back to sorting and folding. A slight woman in a huge yellow T-shirt and bedroom slippers walked up to the table, toting a couple kids under five, a boy and a girl. Caddy sized them up and looked for a box to fill. The children stared blankly and did not speak as Caddy spoke to them. The slight woman held them close to her side, a hand over each, saying they had just seen their aunt carried away.

“She lay over them, pressing her body against them,” the woman said. “The roof blew off, and she was sucked up into the sky.”

The woman bent at the waist, shaking. Jamey got down on one knee and smiled at the children. “That’s supreme sacrifice,” Jamey said. “I know she must have loved both of you lots. That love you feel in your heart for her won’t ever go away. You keep her there.”

Jamey Dixon touched each of their small hands, their eyes finally meeting his as if just coming awake. Caddy kept folding, crying a bit but folding, as more boxes of clothes appeared from strangers and friends. Food was served and then ran out. More food appeared. So many people lay up under the big tin roof that tarps were brought in to expand the shelter. God was good.

Quinn and Boom drove Kenny out to see his daddy, after getting word that his mother had been missing since the tornado. Kenny’s daddy, whose name was Ken Senior, lived in a little white cabin about five miles outside Yellow Leaf. He was a veteran, seeing too much action as a Huey pilot in Vietnam, picking up the dead and the wounded from hot LZs, and had spent most of the last twenty years sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap bourbon. He was a good man, round and bald like his son, who got out of the chair only for church and hunting season. His den was filled with the heads of a dozen trophy bucks. The bucks had held firm on the wall even though most of the house had been chewed up and spit out a hundred meters away.

“Why didn’t y’all just get in the shelter?” Kenny said. “That’s why we put one in.”

Ken Senior shook his head, eyes red-rimmed with sadness, cigarette in hand and a gaping wound in his chest as large as a fist. He said some flying glass had caught him.

“You’re going to die,” Kenny said. “Come on.”

“Not without her,” he said. “I couldn’t get in the shelter because she couldn’t get there.”

Quinn looked to Kenny, knowing that Kenny’s mother had been bedridden since a car accident three years ago left her with bad knees and frequent migraines. Kenny took off his ball cap and turned and studied his parents’ house as if it were the first time he noticed that half of it was gone.

“Quinn?”

He turned as Boom walked into the wreckage, that weird part, the chair and the three walls and the deer heads looking like some kind of theater prop. The sun was nearly down, red and bold all across the west like something out of a John Ford film. He nodded to Quinn and motioned with his head for him to come on away from Kenny and the old man, who kept up the arguing about going to the hospital.

“About a quarter mile to the north,” Boom said. “Right in the middle of the cornfield.”

“You sure?”

“It’s an old woman,” Boom said.

Quinn nodded and turned.

“Woman is nekkid,” Boom said. “Bring some water, her face gonna have to get clean of the dirt to tell for sure.”

Quinn motioned across the way for Kenny, who rushed out at attention in his usual unselfish way. “Sheriff?”

“Boom found something,” Quinn said.

“Is it her?”

“I can take a look, Kenny,” Quinn said. “I’ll let you know.”

Kenny shook his head, looking down at his boots. His father yelling from the remnants of his home, “If y’all know something, you boys better tell me. I ain’t leaving here until I know. You fucking hear me?”

Kenny nodded more to Quinn than his father. “How far?”

“Boom says a quarter mile.”

Kenny nodded and turned over his shoulder to his father, dropping his voice. “He ain’t going to get help unless he knows. You think we can get that four-wheeler out of your truck? I can ride him on out.”

“It’s just a body,” Quinn said. “We don’t know for sure.”

“What’s Boom think?”

Quinn didn’t say anything. Kenny nodded. Quinn went to his F-250, Boom already having repaired a lot of the damage before the storm hit, but the truck still showing lots of dents and scrapes from the chase in the woods that morning.

Quinn slid down the ramps and drove the ATV out of the truck bed. He left it idling, walking back with Kenny to his father, helping the old man out of his old recliner. They both held on to an arm, propping him up as he shuffled more than walked. Kenny got onto the 4-wheeler, and Quinn helped Ken Senior onto the back, the old man wrapping his arms around Kenny’s waist.

Quinn started the truck and rode with Boom down the road scattered with broken limbs and fallen trees, zigzagging in and out until Boom pointed the way to the big open field. The field had been recently planted, small green corn plants dotting straight and true across the acreage, some pulled up in thick swirls of upchurned earth. Halfway across the plantings, there was a body. Boom had spotted it from the road.

Boom took his good hand and lifted a water jug to his mouth. He offered Quinn a drink, and the two crawled out, carrying the jug with them, walking across the cornfield in the last red light of day. The 4-wheeler came up behind them, running slow and solid by their sides as they walked, not overtaking them, Kenny still letting Quinn take the lead to the body.

The woman was old and portly. She lay contorted and twisted, naked but covered in mud and debris, her face coated in dry, blackened earth. Boom looked to the men, loosened the cap from the water jug, and began to pour.

The wail from the old man, still perched on back of the 4-wheeler, filled the little valley. The wail became deep sobbing, and Kenny held his father the way a father might hold his own child.

Quinn and Boom turned away, walking back across the field and toward the truck.

The men did not speak. The red-and-black twilight was turning to gray and full black. You could see the stars and a sliver of moon.

“That’s a hell of a thing,” Boom said.

“Yep.”

“You make any sense why this stuff happens?”

“Nope.”

Boom held on to a fence post with his only hand before jumping across a narrow ravine and over to the highway. “Yeah, me neither.”

•   •   •

Johnny Stagg had
promised
Esau a fucking doctor.

Instead he sent up some teenage girl with a goddamn sewing kit, telling him she’d done a full year of nursing at junior college before she said to hell with it and became a stripper.

“Baby, I got glass in my eye,” he said. “I don’t need no one to feel around my nut sack.”

The girl said she was twenty-one and that her name was Sandi Jo and if he had a problem with her skills, he could go wait at the county hospital. “But I don’t think they have power or lights, and you might have to wait maybe, I don’t know, two weeks before seeing someone.”

Esau nodded. Sandi Jo opened up her doctor’s bag and pulled out a syringe and a vial, Esau thinking,
OK, this is how it goes; Stagg is going to shoot my ass full of dope or poison and drop my ass in some deep hole.
“No way, baby.”

“You really want me to start digging in that eye with a set of tweezers and no pain management?” Sandi Jo, maybe a hundred pounds, no ass or tits, with black streaks in her blond hair, just sort of shrugged. “Fine by me, Red.”

“Don’t call me Red.”

“You the reddest man I ever saw,” she said. “I bet you get burnt to a crisp, you down on the coast. That’s where I was supposed to be this weekend until this shitstorm hit. Now Mr. Stagg says we all need to stay if we want to keep dancing. He said we can earn an assload of cash with all them emergency workers, Guard folks, and all. He’s probably right. Mr. Stagg kind of reminds me of my grandpa.”

“Shit,” Esau said. “Go ahead and stick me.”

“You sure?”

“Goddamn, I’m sure. Go ahead stick me.”

The girl shot him in the closed eye, the damn eye feeling so swollen and puffy that it wasn’t any pain. He gritted his teeth anyway, her turning a table lamp from Stagg’s desk full on his face, trying to work that lid open.

“You are swelled tight.”

“No shit.”

“You swelled too tight and I won’t be able to see that glass.”

“Where you do your nurse training?”

“Northeast.”

“Mmmhhm.”

She let out a long breath and winced. “Damn, Red. That looks like shit. Your whole eye ain’t nothing but blood. I got some antibiotics in my bag. I get most of my shit from a veterinarian who thinks I look just like Carrie Underwood.”

“Who you work on?”

“Girls don’t have no money,” she said. “You know, lots of female kind of afflictions.”

“Can you get it?”

Esau was not seeing shit right now but that hot, white light, thinking of getting this thing settled and then meeting up with Becky and then getting right with Jamey Dixon. Ain’t no one expected the wrath of God to come down onto this godforsaken county and say hello, least of all Esau. Esau thought maybe some of this had to do with Dixon and that girl he’d killed and then him getting pardoned. If Dixon hadn’t been trying to hot-jockey things, maybe Bones’s poor, dumb black ass would still be alive. Johnny Stagg told him his neck had been broken on a tree limb, his body sent back to the Farm. The worst part of it was that Bones would be going back, buried in that no-luck field by the horse stables where they planted the convicts whose families didn’t even want to acknowledge that you had a life.

“Got it,” Sandi Jo said. “Got it.”

Esau’s good eye shifted off the light and saw a sliver of glass, maybe a half-inch long, dripping with blood from a set of tweezers. She picked up a big bottle of something and squirted it hard all over into his eye, bloody water dripping off his face and onto his hands and down his shirt and across Johnny Stagg’s desk, the nameplate saying:
JONATHAN T. STAGG, BOARD PRESIDENT
.

Sandi Jo wiped up the mess with a roll of paper towels and handed him a wad. “Hold that against your eye,” she said. “I’ll get some gauze and tape, and you better not be taking it off for a couple weeks. Go see a doctor when you can. But not here, they got enough shit to deal with.”

“How bad is town?”