The Covenant (26 page)

“I know she's a little odd,” Jenny said.

“She's more than a little odd. Holly is what people used to call a nymphomaniac. I don't know what they call it today. She craves sex, but she derives no pleasure from the act. Instead, sex is how she obtains the approval and acceptance of others that she so desperately needs. Sex is the only kind of intimacy she understands, or wants. She also uses sex to manipulate others.”

“Are you revealing secrets of confession?” I asked, half joking. I tried to laugh but it didn't sound very sincere. Jenny gave me a pained look.

Deacon pretended to ignore the lameness of my question. “I'm no priest. Besides, she confessed nothing.”

“One time she hinted that the two of you were…” Jenny started to say.

“Her relationship with me is entirely one-sided.” As a preacher, Deacon knew how to spout beautiful, believable lies to people who aren't ready to hear the truth. I prided myself on the micron-level sensitivity of my bullshit detector, but I couldn't smell what he was shoveling. He seemed perfectly sincere in his pity for Holly, even as he carefully avoided anything resembling an answer. He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. “She has, of course, poured out her heart to me, confessed her undying love and her desire to settle down and be a faithful minister's wife. I didn't believe half of what she said, and I have my doubts about the rest. She doesn't need a ring, all she needs is to find Jesus. I tried to minister to her, but it is difficult to help someone who doesn't want your help.”

Now I knew he was speaking to me, even though his eyes were still closed. Rosettes of pool light played across his smug, smiling face, while I resisted the impulse to dapple his forehead with my heel.

Jenny went inside to put Cassie to bed. Or maybe she left to give us a chance to be alone together. I saw her watching through the kitchen window.

“Remember when I told you about my dream of finding you dying in a desert, and my call to heal you?” Deacon asked.

“I don't know that I need healing,” I said. “My demons are a part of me. If you take them away, I will no longer be me.”

“I'd like you to come to my church this Sunday and hear me preach.”

I decided to change the subject. “Earlier you mentioned Overton Stirling. Did you know he's buried in the crypt in the woods?”

“That's right,” he said.

“You said he abandoned the house he built for his second wife after she died in childbirth. What happened to his first wife?”

“She and all their children died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1873. Overton had the tunnel dug so he could visit his dead wife and children without being seen. Ruth remembers seeing
memento mori
of the kids—photos taken after their death. Her father showed them to her when she was a little girl.”

“Gus?”

“Caesar Augustus Stirling was Overton's last child. In 1893, he remarried and built Winchester House for his new young wife. Barely a year later, she died in childbirth and he moved back into the plantation house, so as to be nearer the family vault. He remained crippled by grief the rest of his days, obsessed with the dead and so unaware of the living world that he failed even to name his infant son.

“Gus was christened by his Negro wet nurse, who raised him. He lived a sort of Tom Sawyer life, while the plantation fell into disrepair and was heavily mortgaged. Gus seemed normal enough in the beginning, even to his nurse, who loved him to her own destruction. She described him to Ruth as a beautiful little baby with fat thighs and cherubic smile bouncing on her knee. She also told Ruth that the Stirlings had been cursed by Albert Stirling's Chickasaw wife, whom he had stolen from her tribe when she was only thirteen. The nurse blamed all their troubles, as well as her own, on that curse.

“By the time he was fourteen, Gus was running a moonshine operation out of the house. By twenty, he owned three whorehouses in Memphis, as well as the infamous Hitching Post tavern on the highway outside of Malvern. Under Gus, it not only provided prostitutes to any man, white or black, who could afford them, but many of his girls were barely of age, and in some cases several years shy of age. Ruth hinted that at one point he robbed the Malvern Bank, which held the mortgage on the plantation, and used the proceeds to pay off that same mortgage. After that Gus became quite wealthy, recovering much of his father's lost fortune by renting out the land for sharecropping. He restored the plantation to a semblance of its former glory. Somewhere along the way, he begat himself a beautiful young daughter named Ruth, some say by one of the Hitching Post girls. He never produced Ruth's mother, nor did he marry, remaining a bachelor until the end of his days.”

As though talking about her had conjured up her ghost, Jenny appeared at the door with a phone in her hand. “Deacon,” she said, her voice trembling. “Luther has been trying to reach you. Ruth passed away this afternoon.”

 

36

I
CALLED MY FATHER
first thing the next morning and asked him to overnight express the dress I'd worn to Mom's funeral. I gave him Jenny's address and he said he would send it right over.

Deacon's HVAC repairman had promised to be at the house by eight with a new five-ton condenser, so while Jenny waited for him to arrive, I grabbed my camera and headed over to Ruth's. The job site was deserted and silent. I expected Deacon to be away handling the funeral arrangements, but I found him installing stained glass in the upper windows, just him and one other guy. No longer covered with blank plywood, the windows were filled with a glory of reflected color.

“How are the funeral arrangements going?” I asked.

“I've been cut out,” Deacon said. “I guess I should count myself lucky. Luther respects his mother's wishes enough to let me deliver the eulogy.” No doubt he was being cut out of a good many other things as well.

He noticed me looking at the bulldozers and graders parked in the shade of the trees. “We were supposed to start running the main water and sewer lines tomorrow, but the county engineer wants more time to review our proposal.”

“I thought everything was ready to go.”

Deacon indicated by his frown that he was not unaware of the implications of the engineer's need to review something he had already approved. “Somebody's interfering,” he shrugged. “Happens all the time with this kind of project.”

“Somebody named Eugene Kitchen?”

“Eugene doesn't have enough influence to change his socks,” Deacon said.

“But he does whatever Luther tells him to do.”

“Luther's been waiting for Ruth to die so he can get his hands on the last bit of her land.”

“But it belongs to you now.”

He smiled hard, his teeth pressed together so hard I could almost hear them crack. “Only as long as I can keep it.”

*   *   *

There wasn't a speck of dust in the air, and the old house was twenty degrees cooler than Jenny's place. It felt weird being here, now that Ruth was gone, though she had moved out a year before I set foot in the place. It was still Ruth's house. I wondered if I would run into her here, if she would still be walking, the way the old folks used to say. A century ago, people thought the spirits of the dead would walk awhile after they died, returning to their houses and visiting their loved ones before moving on. The loved ones would abandon the house until they were buried, so as to avoid that final parting. It would be just like Ruth to haunt her old house, if she could find it. So much had changed since Deacon got his hands on it.

I started upstairs, photographing the balcony area. As I set my tripod in the hall, I noticed a mattress in one of the bedrooms, its tangle of sheets pushed against one wall, and pillows scattered across the floor as though the bed had exploded. All those pillows bothered me, for some reason. They seemed like more than one person would need. Then again, some people slept with lots of pillows. And some people slept with lots of people. But who was I to judge, or be jealous?

I took pictures until my battery died, my best day of work since I started the project, and covered almost the entire second floor. Before I left, I sat on the porch smoking a cigarette and listening to the silence of the construction site. Not only was no one working, two-thirds of Deacon's followers had unplugged their trailers, folded up their tents, and decamped, leaving behind drifts of empty water bottles, dirty diapers, and hamburger wrappers. Those that remained hid away from the sun inside their campers, their air conditioners humming like a hive of drowsy bees.

*   *   *

When I got back to Jenny's, the man was still working on the air conditioner. He was a big Hispanic guy, enormous, with a head like a brown pumpkin, close-shaved, tats running down his neck into his shirt. He twiddled with his gauges and side-eyed me while I watched him fill the condenser with freon. I was making him nervous, but for no obvious reason. People usually have a reason for everything they do, even if they don't know it themselves. “When I was a vice cop,” I said and watched his neck muscles bunch into knots, “I busted this guy for selling hits off his freon bottle to a bunch of middle school kids.”

Without taking his eyes off his gauges, he said, without a trace of accent, “I have to account for every ounce I sell.”

“That can't be easy.”

He shrugged. “Stuff's expensive.”

“I bet.” I walked around to the other side of the condenser unit and leaned against the house. The bricks were warm enough to bake a pizza. “You do a lot of work for Deacon?”

“Sometimes.” He unscrewed a hose, loosing a cold jet of frost across his fingers. He didn't even flinch. “I do the air and plumbing on his church.”

“It isn't built yet.”

“His other one.” He unscrewed another hose. “In the strip mall off the highway.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don't usually do residential work.”

“What's going on over there?”

He looked up to see where I was looking. I was looking at him. “Over where?”

“At Deacon's church.”

“I don't know.” I let him think about his answer long enough to light a cigarette. I didn't really want it. I just wanted to give him time to think. “I heard they pulled his permit,” he said after a while.

“The county?” He nodded. “When?”

“This morning. Served papers on him, too.”

“What kind of papers?”

“Stop work. Cease and desist. Something like that.”

“Is that why all his people left?”

He shrugged and finished unhooking his gauges. He stood up, picked up his freon bottle, slung the hoses over his shoulder, started to walk away, then stopped. “They said something about INS.”

“I'm not INS.”

He let out a long woosh of air and smiled. “Damn, I thought I was
atrapados
. I made you for a cop the minute I saw you.”

I didn't know whether I should take that as a compliment. It had been years since anyone made me for anything but a junkie, but I still disliked cops. “That was a long time ago,” I said as I grabbed his tool bucket and walked him to his van.

“Listen.” He paused in putting his stuff away. “Deacon's people started moving out a couple of weeks ago. I talked to one guy. They were scared.”

“Of what?”

“That old house. Have you been in it?”

“Once or twice.”

“Deacon wanted me to put in central air and plumbing, but I turned him down. Like I said, I usually don't do residential work.”

“Why not?”

“There's no money in it, unless you're doing a full install.”

So naturally he turned down a full install. I wondered what had them so spooked. I'd never seen the first spirit inside the house itself. Maybe it was the woods that got to them. “Have they abandoned Deacon?” I asked.

“No. They still go to church. And they'll come back when he starts building. They just don't want to work in that house.”

He picked up a couple of fuses and a roll of solder that had spilled out, tossed them inside and slammed the door before anything could escape. “I'll just get the power switched on,” he said.

By suppertime, we had cold air again. At the time it seemed to be the only thing that mattered.

 

37

Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast hath devoured him: and we shall see what will become of his dreams.

—G
ENESIS
37: 19–20

I
PUT ON THE DRESS DAD
sent from home, the one I'd worn only once before—to my mother's funeral—and looked at myself in the mirror: ankle-length black dress with a small white flower print, white leather purse, belt, and shoes, black gloves, small white Doris Day hat with a gauzy black veil. I looked like a Mennonite.

Stirling Baptist Church was the sort of place you had to experience to truly believe. The complex of buildings, including a fitness facility with Olympic swimming pool, tennis courts and bowling lanes, a pre-K-through-eighth-grade private school, a private Baptist seminary, and a sanctuary larger than most college basketball arenas, stood in the middle of a vast gated compound that, with its layered embankments and ditches and overlapping fields of enfilading fire, seemed designed to hold off the entire Red Army, or more likely, hordes of left behind heathens at the Final Judgment. Deacon called it Fort God.

We were let into the sanctuary by one of Stegall's paramilitary goons. He was dressed in black suit, tie and combat boots, the chip on his shoulder bigger than the SIG Sauer holstered on his hip. I guessed by his presence that Senator Mickelson would grace the proceedings and was not disappointed. We found him bending over the open casket. For a second I thought he was biting Ruth on the neck.