The Covenant (18 page)

At the beginning of the fourth inning, Holly took the mound. Deacon paused his narrative to shout “
Hey batter batter!
” His voice drowned out the others in the crowd and seemed to carry to the farthest reaches of the park.

“Let's see if you still got the old pepper, sweetheart,” Eugene shouted as he squatted behind the plate. He popped a flabby fist in his glove and people started to cheer. “Come on Holly! Let's see what you got, babe!” She kicked the dirt around with her cleats while she loosened up her throwing arm, adjusted her ball cap to shade the sun lowering behind the plate, unbuttoned the top button on her jersey to give everyone the best possible view of her tits.

While Eugene was still popping his glove and shouting, “Throw the damn ball!,” she whipped an underhanded scorcher across the plate. It bounced off the top of his mitt and his nose exploded in a mist of blood. He went over backward, screaming like a peacock. The game ground to a stop while they stretchered him off the field. Her next toss was a strike that the batter never saw.

Before I could swing the conversation back to the topic of the residents of Stirling Estates, Deacon picked up the narrative of his Pilgrim's Progress. He wasn't kidding about it being a long story. I should have gone first. “You can't have a church without a congregation and my saints were scattered I knew not where, but the True Gospel was revealed in my heart and I had to minister to somebody. So I opened up my Bible and found Matthew 25: 35–36. ‘
I was hungry and you fed me; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you took me in. Naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison, and you came to me
.
'
I thought,
Where can I find those who are hungry and thirsty, strangers naked and alone, sick and in prison?
I thought about it for a long time and I prayed on it, until one night I had a dream about my grandmother in her nursing home.

“So that's where my ministry took me—to the nursing homes, to minister to those in their last and in many cases worst days upon this earth, to bring them such comfort as I could and the Gospel that could set their souls free. At one home, I met a woman named Ruth Vardry. Her son had forced her out of her house so he could sell it. To spite him, she gave the house and what remained of her land to me to build my church. She gave me the money to restore her house to its former glory, so that, in her words, it can finally do some good in the world instead of causing only pain and misery.

“I didn't start ministering in the nursing homes for the money, but the money is good because of the message I bring. It is the Good News, the lost Gospel that was buried and hidden by the bishops of the early Church. I bring people hope when they have no hope, when they are staring down their last days upon this earth and wondering what will become of them and all their works and all their sins. I bring hope and peace, and in return, they fill my cup to overflowing. Naturally, some are like Ruth—I have no illusions about her. She has bestowed such bounty upon me to keep her children and grandchildren from inheriting it.”

He took a check out of his shirt pocket and showed it to me. It was made out for nine grand and assigned to his church building fund. The paper was damp with his sweat and the date was almost a month old. He was so flush he hadn't bothered depositing it.

“The man who gave me this has been in that nursing home for three years now. He can count on one hand the number of times his children have visited him. His mind is as bright as yours or mine, but his body has failed him and he is a widower. His children have all but abandoned him, but after he wrote me a check for twenty grand, they came.”

There was a break in the bell of his voice, just the slightest quaver of an emotional fracture. His body was still relaxed, reclined upon the hot metal bleachers, but his jaw was clenched so he could hardly get the words past his teeth. “Oh yes, they came. And they brought their lawyer.”

 

25

H
OLLY'S NORTH LAKERS WON
by three runs. They might have scored more if Nathan hadn't hit into a double play with the bases loaded in the last inning. After the game, the cotillion moved back to Luther's Roman garden.

The sun was still high and hot, but there was enough shade to survive as long as the beer didn't run out. I wandered through the dinner crowd, casually overhearing as many conversations as I could, but no one was discussing murder, just the usual racketeering, embezzlement, insider trading and corporate espionage that everyone does without thinking or even trying very hard to hide.

Through some error I had been assigned to Senator Mickelson's table, between Holly and Nathan. I tried to wrangle a seat next to Mrs. Ruth so I could mine her for gossip, but Luther and his wife had already bookended her before anyone else could get close. Senator Mickelson was seated directly across from Ruth. There was an empty spot for Jenny Loftin, but she hadn't arrived yet. The other empty seat was reserved for Eugene Kitchen, but they had taken him by helicopter to the hospital in Collierville. Eugene's seat was between Deacon and the senator, so I grabbed it, even though it upset the seating arrangement. At the far end sat Holly's fiancé Justin, and Nathan's date Annette LaGrance (the
Elle
model's mother, I later found out).

Senator Mickelson had changed into a sailor-blue jacket with chicken guts on his sleeves. He doffed his white captain's cap and handed it to Stegall as he sat down, then squeezed my knee under the table. Perhaps he thought I had been brought in for the evening's entertainment. Ruth was a picture of misery between her son and his wife. Every time Virginia Vardry tried to whisper in her ear, she swatted at her like a horse fly.

When we were all seated, Luther asked, “Has anyone heard how Eugene is doing?”

“His nose is broken, but he'll be OK,” Nathan answered.

Holly sipped her wine, leaving behind a small rose petal of lipstick folded over the rim of the glass. She hadn't changed out of her uniform. She leaned across and whispered to Deacon, “I meant to hit him, just not in the face. That was his fault.” She scraped a breadstick through the table butter, meticulously inserted it like a catheter into her mouth, then swiftly munched down its length until her ruby lips met her scarlet fingertips. Patting her lips with a napkin, she added, “He's always hanging around, hitting on me and drinking Daddy's liquor.”

“I thought your father was Baptist,” I said.

“He is.”

“What were you aiming at?” Deacon asked.

“His nuts,” she laughed. “First pitch. My arm was a little stiff.” She performed the same perfunctory operation with a second butter-lubed breadstick, so swiftly that were it not for the minute and rapid oscillations of her munching jowls she might have been performing a carnival trick, like a sword swallower.

Ruth said, “Luther tells me you don't want to marry that boy, what's his name?”

“Justin. His name's Justin, Meemaw. He's always accusing me of cheating on him. I can't cheat on him. I don't even love him.”

He sat next to her at the end of the table, quietly stabbing postholes in the butter with the broken half of a breadstick.

“You're wearing his ring,” Ruth said.

Holly moved her hand to allow a shaft of sunlight to sparkle the crush of diamonds caked atop her finger. “It is a pretty ring.” She squeezed Justin's arm and kissed him on the cheek.

“Only the best for my Holly,” he sighed to the tablecloth.

“Oh my God, that is
not
a Coach handbag!” Holly cried.

“This old thing?” Jenny said as she sauntered up, flaunting a patchwork denim purse before us. Her shoulder-length blond hair was pushed back and held in place by an orange bandana. Her face was fresh-scrubbed and freckled, and she wore a pair of tiny, rectangular, wire-framed sunglasses perched on the ridge of her sunburned nose. Her lacy white blouse hung loose out of her jeans, and floppy beaded sandals dangled from her long toes. She flopped into her chair as though at the very end of her resources.

*   *   *

When the house servants announced the buffet was ready, we queued up. While the good senator stood behind me surreptitiously pressing his boner into my back, folks let us skip ahead until we were at the head of the line. He piled his plate with barbecued pork, pork ribs, barbecued chicken, fried catfish, hush puppies, baked beans, slaw, spaghetti, potato chips and fried pickles.

“Aren't you eating?” he asked. Apparently my portions were too small for him to see without his reading glasses. His breath smelled like dentures and minty-fresh death.

Arriving back at our table I found that Stegall had misappropriated my seat. I was forced to dine beside Nathan. The dinner proceeded without unnecessary effusion of sophomoric sexual innuendo for the first ten minutes or so. When Senator Mickelson leaned back and unbuttoned his trousers with a groan, it was as though the lion had staggered away from its kill and gone to lay down in the shade. Hyena laughter broke out at one of the tables. Luther's dogs were fighting underneath it, knocking people over like bowling pins.

Holly consumed barely enough to keep a goldfish alive before pushing away her plate and departing into the house to change out of her uniform. Jenny, I noticed, supped exclusively from a bottle of Chardonnay. Deacon received a phone call and was spirited away to some theological emergency. I watched to make sure he didn't follow Holly inside, hating myself for caring, but he left by the side gate.

Nearly everyone had eaten their fill, but Nathan seemed to get his second wind along with his second helping. He grunted and shoved a forkful of barbecued raccoon topped with mashed potatoes into his mouth. He pointed at the barely polite bit of meat still on my plate. The coon was merely symbolic, like the bread and wine of olden times, when people knew their places and kept to them. Everyone was expected to partake, if only in sacramental portions. “What's the matter? Don't you like it?” he asked.

“I'm full, thanks,” I said.

“I love this shit.”

Elbow on the table, I rested my chin thoughtfully on one hand. “Did you kill it yourself?”

“Hell no. We buy the coons from some niggers I know.”

“Nathan!” Luther barked.

“It's OK, Daddy. Ain't no niggers around to hear.” The caterers were white. No doubt they'd been selected off a picture menu just like the chicken and ribs.

“It's ironic, don't you think?” Nathan said to me.

“What is?”

“We buy our coons … from the coons.” His face broke apart. He'd been saving that one all day, just waiting for someone to pull his finger. Luther straightened his tie and gazed mournfully across the lake, perhaps noting that some shirtless, drunken woman was riding the prow of a speeding boat, like a figurehead of winged Victory.

I stood, collected my paper plate to throw it away.

“You didn't eat much. Aren't you hungry?” Nathan asked.

“Us girls have to watch our figures.”

“Let me watch it for you. Do you work out? Your body is amazing.”

He was a broken record. He had the same five lines memorized and repeated them endlessly. I started to walk away. “Jackie,” Ruth quavered. “Take me away from here.”

I dropped my plate in a garbage can and pulled Ruth's chair back from the table. “Take me down to the lake,” she said.

“Can I call you?” Nathan asked as I pushed his grandmother away.

“You can, but I probably won't answer.”

“I'll see you around then.”

“Sure. We'll probably run into each other at the cross burning.”

 

26

I
PUSHED RUTH DOWN
the long path to the boathouse and out to the end of the dock. Jet skis and speedboats roared up and down the lake, dense as rush-hour traffic, towing sunburned skiers saluting each other with beers lifted in their hands. The sun was still high and bright. Ruth sat blinking in her chair and I wondered if she could see anything that passed before her.

The day had seemed to age her. She leaned wearily on the arm of her chair, her veined and knobby fingers clinging to a sweaty glass as she sucked watery bourbon through a tiny cocktail straw.

“So much has changed, Jackie,” she sighed. “I can't remember how the land looked before they flooded everything, before Luther built all these damn houses. I want to see the hills and the hollows again, the old farms and pastures. It's all gone.”

When I was a cop, they taught us tricks for stimulating the memory of witnesses. I needed Mrs. Ruth to tell me about the people who lived in all the damn houses her son built over her memories. The only thing I had learned today was that everybody worshiped Sam Loftin. He wasn't just the HOA treasurer. His company mowed their lawns and raked their leaves. He coached their daughters' softball teams and taught their Sunday schools. Mrs. Ruth knew Sam and she knew all the people Sam knew. Hopefully she knew who hated him, who would want to see him dead.

Even a trained observer can't recall details cold, like looking at a picture held up to the eye. That's not the way the mind works. Humans evolved remembering stories and songs; sequences of events, not moments in time. If you ask a man to describe a photograph of his wife of twenty years to a police sketch artist, the picture would come out looking like a stranger. But ask him to describe her at the supper table last night, when they fought about the woman she thought he was sleeping with, and what you get is nearly as good as a photograph.

“Close your eyes,” I said.

She closed her eyes.

“Pick a time, the best time you remember, before everything changed. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.” She smiled.

“It's your fifteenth birthday. What do you see?”

“I see our herd of Jersey cows. My God, I forgot we had them. They were the prettiest dairy cows you ever saw. They all had names. I can still smell their breath in the morning and the warm milk steaming in a cold pail.”